




* o „ o ^ ^K^"*- O 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING 



..^^ y 



H. CLAY TRUMBULL 

BDITOR OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TIMES ; AUTHOR OF TEACHING AND 
TEACHERS, YALB LECTURES ON THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL, ETC. 



X 



I 




MOV 20 '"^O, , 



PHILADELPHIA 

JOHN D. WATTLES, Publisher 

1891 



\-. 



Copyright, iJgo 

BY 

H. CLAY TRUMBULL 



IBlllS 



PREFACE. 



Hints on Child-Training may be helpful, where 
a formal treatise on the subject would prove be- 
wildering. It is easier to see how one phase or 
another of children's needs is to be met, than it 
is to define the relation of that phase of the case to 
all other phases, or to a system that includes them 
all. Therefore it is that this series of Hints is 
ventured by me for the benefit of young parents, 
although I would not dare attempt a systematic 
treatise on the entire subject here touched upon. 

Thirty years ago, when I was yet a young father, 
a friend, who knew that I had for years been in- 
terested in the study of methods of education, said 
to me, " Trumbull, what is your theory of child- 
training? " " Theory?" I responded. "I have no 
theory in that matter. I had lots of theories before 
I had any children; but now I do, with fear and 
trembling, in every case just that which seems to 

5 



6 PRE FA CE. 

be the better thing for the hour, whether it agrees 
with any of my old theories or not." 

Whatever theory of child-training may show 
itself in these Hints, has been arrived at by induc- 
tion in the process of my experiences with children 
since I had to deal with the matter practically, 
apart from any preconceived view of the principles 
involved. Every suggestion in these Hints is an 
outcome of experiment and observation in my life 
as a father and a grandfather, while it has been 
carefully considered in the light of the best lessons 
of practical educators on every side. 

These Hints were begun for the purpose of giv- 
ing help to a friend. They were continued because 
of the evident popular interest in them. They are 
sent out in this completed form in the hope that 
they will prove of service to parents who are feel- 
ing the need of something more practical in the 
realm of child-training than untested theories. 

H. Clay Trumbull. 
Philadelphia, September 15, 1890. 



CONTENTS. 



T. PAGE 

Child-Training: What Is It? ii 

II. 

The Duty of Training Children 17 

III. 
Scope and Limitations of Child-Training s^ 

IV. 
Discerning a Child's Special Need of Training 29 

V. 

Will-Training, Rather than Will-Breaking 37 

VI. 

The Place of " Must " in Training 53 

VII. 

Denying a Child Wisely 61 

7 



8 CONTENTS, 

VIII. PAGB 

Honoring a Child Individuality 71 

IX. 

Letting Alone as a Means of Child-Training 83 

X. 

Training a Child to Self-Control 93 

XI. 
Training a Child Not to Tease loi 

XII. 
Training a Child's Appetite 109 

XIII. 
Training a Child as a Questioner 119 

XIV. 
Training a Child's Faith 129 

XV. 
Training Children to Sabbath Observance 139 

XVI. 
Training a Child in Amusements iSS 



CONTENTS. 9 

XVII. PAGE 

Training a Child to Courtesy 165 

XVIII. 
Cultivating a Child's Taste in Reading 175 

XIX. 
The Value of Table-Talk 187 

XX. 

Guiding a Child in Companionships 197 

XXI. 
Never Punish a Child in Anger 205 

XXII. 
Scolding is Never in Order 217 

XXIII. 
Dealing Tenderly with a Child's Fears 223 

XXIV. 
The Sorrows of Children 239 

XXV. 
The Place of Sympathy in Child-Training ...... 247 



lO CONTENTS. 

XXVI. PAGE 

Influence of the Home Atmosphere 257 

XXVII. 
The Power of a Mother's Love 263 

XXVIII. 
Allowing Play to a Child's Imaginatkn 277 

XXIX. 

Giving Added Value to a Child's Christmas 283 

XXX. 
Good-Night Words 291 



INDEX 301 



I. 

CHILD-TRAINING: WHAT IS IT f 



The term "training," like the term "teaching," 
is used in various senses; hence it is Hable to be 
differently understood by different persons, when 
applied to a single department of a parent's duties 
in the bringing up of his children. Indeed, the 
terms "training" and "teaching" are often used 
interchangeably, as covering the entire process of 
a child's education. In this sense a child's train- 
ing is understood to include his teaching; and, 
again, his teaching is understood to include his 
training. But in its more restricted sense the 
training of a child is the shaping, the developing, 
and the controlling of his personal faculties and 
powers ; while the teaching of a child is the secur- 
ing to him of knowledge from beyond himself. 

It has been said that the essence of teaching is 



1 2 HINTS ON CHILD -TRA INING. 

causing another to know. It may similarly be said 
that the essence of training is causing another to 
do. Teaching gives knowledge. Training gives 
skill. Teaching fills the mind. Training shapes 
the habits. Teaching brings to the child that 
which he did not have before. Training enables 
a child to make use of that w^iich is already his 
possession. We teach a child the meaning of 
words. We train a child in speaking and walk- 
ing. We teach him the truths which we have 
learned for ourselves. We train him in habits of 
study, that he may be able to learn other truths 
for himself Training and teaching must go on 
together in the wise upbringing of any and every 
child. The one will fail of its own best end if it 
be not accompanied by the other. He who knows 
how to teach a child, is not competent for the over- 
sight of a child's education unless he also knows 
how to train a child. 

Training is a possibility long before teaching is. 
Before a child is old enough to know what is said 
to it, it is capable of feeling, and of conforming to, 



HINTS ON CHILD- TRAINING, 1 3 

or of resisting, the pressure of efforts for its train- 
ing. A child can be trained to go to sleep in the 
arms of its mother or nurse, or in a cradle, or on a 
bed ; with rocking, or without it ; in a light room, 
or in a dark one; in a noisy room, or only in a 
quiet one ; to expect nourishment and to accept it 
only at fixed hours, or at its own fancy, — while as 
yet it cannot understand any teaching concerning 
the importance or the fitness of one of these things. 
A very young child can be trained to cry for what 
it wants, or to keep quiet, as a means of securing 
it. And, as a matter of fact, the training of chil- 
dren is begun much earlier than their teaching. 
Many a child is well started in its life-training by 
the time it is six weeks old; even though its ele- 
mentary teaching is not attempted until months 
after that. 

There is a lesson just at this point in the signifi- 
cation of the Hebrew word translated "train" in 
our English Bible. It is a noteworthy fact, that 
this word occurs only twice in the Old Testament, 
and it has no equivalent in the New. Those who 



14 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

were brought up in the household of Abraham, 
" the father of the faithful," are said to have been 
"trained" (Gen. 14: 14). A proverb of the ages 
gives emphasis to a parent's duty to "train up" 
his child with wise considerateness (Prov. 22 : 6). 
And nowhere else in the inspired record does the 
original of this word " train," in any of its forms, 
appear. 

The Hebrew word thus translated is a peculiar 
one. Its etymology shows that its primary mean- 
ing is " to rub the gullet ;" and its origin seems to 
have been in the habit, still prevalent among primi- 
tive peoples, of opening the throat of a new-born 
babe by the anointing of it with blood, or with 
saliva, or with some sacred liquid, as a means of 
giving the child a start in life by the help of 
another's life. The idea of the Hebrew word thus 
used seems to be that, as this opening of the gullet 
of a child at its very birth is essential to the habitu- 
ating of the child to breathe and to swallow cor- 
rectly, so the right training of a child in all proper 
habits of life is to begin at the child's very birth. 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 5 

And the use of the word in the places where we 
find it, would go to show that Abraham with all 
his faith, and Solomon with all his wisdom, did not 
feel that it would be safe to put off the start with a 
child's training any later than this. 

Child-training properly begins at a child's birth, 
but it does not properly end there. The first effort 
in the direction of child-training is to train a child 
to breathe and to swallow ; but that ought not to 
be the last effort in the same direction. Child-train- 
ing goes on as long as a child is a child ; and 
child-training covers every phase of a child's action 
and bearing in life. Child-training affects a child's 
sleeping and waking, his laughing and crying, his 
eating and drinking, his looks and his movements, 
his self-control and his conduct toward others. 
Child-training does not change a child's nature, 
but it does change his modes of giving expression 
to his nature. Child-training does not give a child 
entirely new characteristics, but it brings him to 
the repression and subdual of certain character- 
istics, and to the expression and development of 



1 6 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

certain others, to such an extent that the sum of 
his characteristics presents an aspect so different 
from its original exhibit that it seems like another 
character. And so it is that child-training is, in 
a sense, like the very making of a child anew. 

Child-training includes the directing and con- 
trolling and shaping of a child's feelings and 
thoughts and words and ways in every sphere of 
his life-course, from his birth to the close of his 
childhood. And that this is no unimportant part 
of a child's upbringing, no intelligent mind will 
venture to question. 



II. 

THE DUTY OF TRAINING 
CHILDREN. 



It is the mistake of many parents to suppose 
that their chief duty is in loving and counseHng 
their children, rather than in loving and training 
them ; that they are faithfully to show their chil- 
dren what they ought to do, rather than to make 
them do it. The training power of the parent is, 
as a rule, sadly undervalued. 

Too many parents seem to take it for granted 
that because their children are by nature very 
timid and retiring, or very bold and forward ; very 
extravagant in speech and manner, or quite disin- 
clined to express even a dutiful sense of gratitude 
and trust ; reckless in their generosity, or pitiably 
selfish ; disposed to overstudy, or given wholly to 
play; one-sided in this, or in that, or in the other. 



1 8 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

trait or quality or characteristic, — therefore those 
children must remain so ; unless, indeed, they out- 
grow their faults, or are induced by wise counsel 
and loving entreaty to overcome them. 

" My boy is irrepressible," says one father. **He 
is full of dash and spirits. He makes havoc in the 
house while at home ; and when he goes out to a 
neighbor's he either has things his own way, or he 
doesn't want to go there again. I really wish he 
had a quieter nature ; but, of course, I can't change 
him. I have given him a great many talks about 
this ; and I hope he will outgrow the worst of it. 
Still he is just what he is, and punishing him 
wouldn't make him anybody else." A good 
mother, on the other hand, is exercised because 
her little son is so bashful that he is always morti- 
fying her before strangers. He will put his finger 
in his mouth, and hang down his head, and twist 
one foot over the other, and refuse to shake hands, 
or to answer the visitor's " H^ow do you do, my 
boy?" or even to say, " I thank you," with distinct- 
ness, when anything is given to him. And the 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 9 

same trouble is found with the tastes as with the 
temperaments of children. One is always ready 
to hear stories read or told, but wall not sit quiet 
and look at pictures, or use a slate and pencil. 
Another, a little older, will devour books of travel 
or adventure, but has no patience with a simple 
story of home life, or a book of instruction in 
matters of practical fact. 

Now it is quite inevitable that children should 
have these peculiarities ; but it is not inevitable that 
they should continue to exhibit them offensively. 
Children can be trained in almost any direction. 
Their natural tendencies may be so curbed and 
guided as no longer to show themselves in disagree- 
able prominence. It is a parent's privilege, and it 
is a parent's duty, to make his children, by God's 
blessing, to be and to do what they should be and 
do, rather than what they would like to be and do. 
If indeed this were not so, a parent's mission would 
be sadly limited in scope, and diminished in impor- 
tance and preciousness. The parent who does not 
recognize the possibility of training his children as 



20 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

well as instructing them, misses one of his highest 
privileges as a parent, and fails of his most impor- 
tant work for his children. 

The skilled physician in charge of a certain 
institution for the treatment of feeble-minded and 
imperfectly developed children, has said, that some 
children who are brought to him are lacking in 
just one important trait or quality, while they pos- 
sess a fair measure of every other. Or it may be 
said, that they have an excess of the trait or quality 
opposite to that which they lack. 

One girl, for example, will be wholly without a 
sense of honesty; will even be possessed with a 
love of stealing for stealing's sake, carrying it to 
such an extent that when seated at the table she 
will snatch a ball of butter from a plate, and wrap 
it up in a fold of her dress. If she should be 
unchecked in this propensity until she were a grown 
woman, she might prove one of the fashionable 
ladies who take books or dry goods from the stores 
where they are shopping, under the influence of 
" kleptomania." 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 21 

Again, a boy has no sense of truth. He will tell 
lies without any apparent temptation to do so, even 
against his own obvious interests. All of us have 
seen persons of this sort in mature life. Some of 
them are to-day in places of prominence in Chris- 
tian work and influence. Yet another child is 
without any sense of reverence, or of modesty, or 
of natural affection. One lacks all control of his 
temper, another of his nerves. And so on in great 
variety. 

The physician of that institution is by no means 
in despair over any of these cases. It is his 
mission to find out the child's special lack, and 
to meet it ; to learn what traits are in excess, and 
to curb them ; to know the child's needs, and to 
train him accordingly. 

Every child is in a sense a partially developed, 
an imperfectly formed child. There are no abso- 
lutely perfect children in this world. All of them 
need restraining in some things and stimulating in 
others. And every imperfect child can be helped 
toward a symmetrical character by wise Christian 



22 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

training. Every home should be an institution for 
the treatment of imperfectly developed children. 
Every father and every mother should be a skilled 
physician in charge of such an institution. There 
are glorious possibilities in this direction j and there 
are weighty responsibilities also. 



III. 

SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS OF 
CHILD- TRA IN INC. 



Child-training can compass much, but child- 
training cannot compass everything, in determin- 
ing the powers and the possibilities of a child under 
training. Each child can be trained in the way he 
should go, but not every child can be trained to go 
in the same way. Each child can be trained to the 
highest and fullest exercise of his powers, but no 
child can be trained to the exercise of powers 
which are not his. Each child can be trained to 
his utmost possibilities, but not every child can be 
trained to the utmost possibilities of every other 
child. Child-training has the fullest scope of the 
capacity of the particular child under treatment, 
and child-training is limited in every case by the 
limitations of that child's capacity. 



27, 



24 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

A child born blind can be trained to such a use 
of his other senses that he can do more in the 
world than many a poorly trained child who has 
sight; but a blind child can never be trained to 
discern differences in colors at a distance, A child 
who has by nature a dull ear for music can be 
trained to more or less of musical skill ; but a 
child who is born without the sense of hearing can 
never be trained to quickness in the discerning of 
sounds. A child can be trained to facility in the 
use of every sense and faculty and limb and mem- 
ber and muscle and nerve which he possesses ; but 
no training will give to a child a new sense, a new 
faculty, a new limb, a new member, a new muscle, 
a new nerve. Child-training can make anything of 
a child that can be made of that child, but child- 
training cannot change a child's nature and identity. 

The limitations of child-training are more likely 
to be realized than its extensive scope. Indeed, 
the supposed limitations of child-training are very 
often unreal ones. Many a parent would say, for 
example, that you cannot change a child's form 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 25 

and features and expression by training ; yet, as a 
matter of fact, a child's form and features and 
expression can be, and often are, materially changed 
by training. The chest is expanded, the waist is 
compressed, a curved spine is straightened, or a 
deformity of limb is corrected, by persistent training 
with the help of mechanical appliances. Among 
some primitive peoples, the form of every child's 
head is brought to a conventional standard by a 
process of training ; as, among other primitive peo- 
ples, the feet or the ears or the eyes or the lips are 
thus conventionally trained into — or out of — shape. 
And in all lands the expression of the face steadily 
changes under the process of persistent training. 

As it is with the physical form, so it is with the 
mental and moral characteristics of a child ; the 
range is wide within the limitations of possible 
results from the training process. A nervous tem- 
perament cannot, it is true, be trained into a phleg- 
matic one, or a phlegmatic temperament be trained 
into a nervous one ; but a child who is quick and 
impulsive can be trained into moderation and care- 



26 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

fulness of speech and of action, while a child who 
is sluggish and inactive can be trained to rapidity 
of movement and to energy of endeavor. An 
imbecile mind can never be trained into the possi- 
bilities of native genius, nor can a moral nature of 
the lowest order be trained to the same measure of 
high conscientiousness as a nature that is keenly 
sensitive to every call of duty and to the rights and 
the feelings of others ; but training can give unsus- 
pected power to the dormant faculties of the dull- 
minded, and can marvelously develop the latent 
moral sense of any child who is capable of discern- 
ing between right and wrong in conduct. 

The sure limitations of a child's possibilities of 
training are obvious to a parent. If one of the 
physical senses be lacking to the child, no training 
will restore that sense, although wise training may 
enable the child to overcome many of the difficul- 
ties that meet him as a consequence of his native 
lack. And so, also, if the child have such unmis- 
takable defects of mind and of character as prove 
him to be inferior to the ordinary grade of average 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 2/ 

humanity, the wisest training cannot be expected 
to Hft him above the ordinary level of average 
humanity. But if a child be in the possession of 
the normal physical senses, and the normal mental 
faculties, and the normal moral capacities, of his 
race, he may, by God's blessing, be trained to the 
best and fullest use of his powers in these several 
spheres, in spite of all the hindrances and draw- 
backs that are found in the perversion or the imper- 
fect development of those powers at his start in life. 

In other words, if the child be grievously 
deformed or defective at birth, or by some early 
casualty, there is an inevitable limitation accord- 
ingly to the possibilities of his training. But if a 
child be in possession of an ordinary measure of 
faculties and capacity, his training will decide the 
manner and method and extent of the use of his 
God -given powers. 

It is, therefore, largely a child's training that set- 
tles the question whether a child is graceful or awk- 
ward in his personal movements, gentle or rough 
in his ways with his fellows, considerate or thought- 



28 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

less in his bearing toward others; whether he is 
captious or tractable within the bounds of due 
restraint ; whether he is methodical and precise, or 
unsystematic and irregular, in the discharge of his 
daily duties ; whether he is faithful in his studies, 
or is neglectful of them ; whether he is industrious 
or indolent in his habits ; whether the tastes which 
he indulges in his diet and dress and reading and 
amusements and companionships are refined, or are 
low. In all these things his course indicates what 
his training has been ; or it suggests the training 
that he needed, but has missed. 



IV. 

DISCERNING A CHILD'S SPECIAL NEED 
OF TRAINING. 



Some one has said, that a mother is quite right 
when she declares enthusiastically of her little one, 
*' There never was such a child as this, in the world, 
before ! " for in fact there never before was such a 
child. Each child starts in life as if he were the 
only child in the world, and the first one ; and he 
is less like other people then than ever he will be 
again. He is conformed to no regulation pattern 
at the outset. He has, to begin with, no stock of 
ideas which have been passed on and approved by 
others. He neither knows nor cares what other 
people think. He is a law unto himself in all mat- 
ters of thought and taste and feeling. He is, so 
far, himself; and, just so far, he is different from 

everybody else. 

29 



30 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

Left to himself, if that were a possibility, every 
child would continue to be himself; but no child is 
left to himself: he is under training and in training 
continually. And so it is that the training of a 
child is quite as likely to change him from his best 
self to a poorer self, as it is to develop and perfect 
that which is best in his distinctive self. Child- 
training is, in many a case, the bringing of a child 
into purely conventional ways, instead of bringing 
out into freest play, in the child, those qualities and 
characteristics which mark him as a unique and indi- 
vidual personality among the sons of men. How 
to learn wherein a child's real self needs stimulat- 
ing, and wherein it needs curbing or changing, is a 
question of questions in child-training. 

No quality of a good physician is of more impor- 
tance than skill in making a diagnosis of a patient's 
case. If a master-mind in this realm were to pass 
with positiveness on the disease of every patient, the 
treatment of that disease would be comparatively 
easy. A young graduate from the medical school, 
or a trained nurse, would then, in most instances, 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 3I 

be capable of knowing and doing that which was 
needful in the premises. But until the diagnosis is 
accurate, the best efforts of the ablest physician are 
liable to be misdirected, and so to be ineffective for 
good. As it is with the physician and his patient, 
so it is with the parent and his child. An accurate 
diagnosis is an essential pre-requisite to wise and 
efficient treatment. The diagnosis secured, the 
matter of treatment is a comparatively easy matter. 
A parent's diagnosis of his child's case is in the 
discerning of his child's faults, as preliminary to 
a process of training for their cure. Until that is 
secured, there is no hope of intelligent and well- 
directed treatment. 

Yet it is not the easiest thing in the world to say 
what are a child's peculiar faults, and what is, there- 
fore, that child's peculiar need of training. Many 
a parent is disturbed by a child's best traits, while 
he underestimates or overlooks that child's chief 
failings. And many another parent who knows 
that his child is full of faults cannot say just what 
they are, or classify them according to their rela- 



32 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

tive prominence and their power for evil. " That 
boy's questions will worry my life out. He is 
always asking questions; and such questions. I 
can't stand it ! " This is said by many a father 
or mother whose child is full of promise, largely 
because he is full of questions. 

But if a boy has a bright mind and positive pref- 
erences, and is ready to study or to work untir- 
ingly in the line of his' own tastes, and in no other 
line, it does not always occur to his parents that 
just here — in this reluctance to apply himself in 
the line of wise expediency rather than of personal 
fancy — there is a failing which, if not trained out 
of that boy, will stand as a barrier to his truest 
manhood, and will make him a second-rate man 
when he might be a first-rate one; a one-sided 
man instead of a well-proportioned man. Such a 
boy is quite likely to be looked upon as one who 
must be permitted to have his own way, since that 
way is evidently not a bad way, and he shows 
unusual power in its direction. So that boy may 
be left untrained in this particular until he is hope- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 33 

lessly past training, merely because his chief fault 
is unrecognized by those who could correct it, and 
who would gladly do so if they saw it in its due 
proportions. 

Careful study and a w^se discrimination are 
needed on a parent's part to ascertain a child's 
peculiar faults. Each parent would do well to ask 
himself, or herself, the questions, " What are the 
special faults of my child ? Where is he weakest ? 
In what direction is his greatest strength liable to 
lead him astray, and when is it most likely to fail 
him ? Which of his faults is most prominent ? 
Which of them is of chief importance for immedi- 
ate correction ?" Such questions as these should 
be considered at a time favorable to deliberate 
judgment, when there is least temptation to be 
influenced by personal feeling, either of preference 
or dissatisfaction. They should be pondered long 
and well. 

The unfriendly criticisms of neighbors, and the 
kind suggestions of friends, are not to be despised 
by a parent in making up an estimate of his child's 



34 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

failings and faults. Rarely is a parent so discern- 
ing, so impartial, and so wise, that he can know 
his children through and through, and be able to 
weigh the several traits, and perceive the every 
imperfection and exaggeration, of their characters, 
with unerring accuracy and absolute fairness. A 
judge is supposed to be disqualified for an impartial 
hearing of a case in which he has a direct personal 
interest. A physician will not commonly make a 
diagnosis of his own disorders, lest his fears or hopes 
should bias his judgment. And a parent is as liable 
as a judge or a physician to be swayed unduly by 
interest or affection, in an estimate of a case which 
is before him for a decision. 

Even though, therefore, every parent must de- 
cide for himself concerning the interests and the 
treatment of his own children, he ought to be 
glad to take into consideration what others think 
and say of those children, while he is making up 
his mind as to his duty in the premises. And 
what is written or said on this subject by com- 
petent educators is worthy of attention from every 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 35 

parent who would train his children understand- 
ingly. There is little danger that any parent will 
give too much study to the question of his child's 
specific needs, or have too many helps to a wise 
conclusion on that point. There is a great deal of 
danger that the whole subject will be neglected or 
undervalued by a parent. 

If a parent were explicitly to ask the question of 
a fair and plain-speaking friend, familiar with that 
parent's children, and competent to judge them, 
What do you think is the chief fault — or the 
most objectionable characteristic — of my son — or 
daughter ? the frank answer to that question would 
in very many cases be an utter surprise to the 
parent, the fault or characteristic named not hav- 
ing been suspected by the parent. A child may 
be so much like the parent just here, that the 
parent's blindness to his or her own chief fault or 
lack may forbid the seeing of the child's similar 
deformity. Or, again, that child may be so totally 
unlike the parent, that the parent will be unable to 
appreciate, or even to apprehend, that peculiarity 



36 HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 

of the child which is apparent to every outside 
intelligent observer. A child's reticence from deep 
feeling has often been counted by an over-demon- 
strative parent as a sign of want of sensitiveness ; 
and so vice versa. 

Parents need help from others, from personal 
friends whom they can trust to speak with impar- 
tiality and kindness, or from the teachers of their 
children, in the gaining of a proper estimate and 
understanding of their children's characteristics 
and needs. The parent who does not realize this 
truth, and act on it, will never do as well as might 
be done for his or her child. God has given 
the responsibility of the training of that child to 
the parent ; but he has also laid on that parent the 
duty of learning, by the aid of all proper means, 
what are that child's requirements, and how to 
meet them. 



V. 

WILL-TRAINING, RATHER THAN 
WILL-BREAKING, 



The measure of will-power is the measure of 
personal power, with a child as with an adult. The 
possession or the lack of will-power is the posses- 
sion or the lack of personal power, in every indi- 
vidual's sphere of life and being. The right or the 
wrong use of will-power is the right or the wrong 
exercise of an individual's truest personality. 
Hence the careful guarding and the wise guiding 
of a child's will should be counted among the fore- 
most duties of one who is responsible for a child's 
training. 

Will-training is an important element in child- 
training ; but will-breaking has no part or place in 
the training of a child. A broken will is worth as 

much in its sphere as a broken bow; just that, and 

37 



38 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

no more. A child with a broken will is not so well 
furnished for the struggle of life as a child with 
only one arm, or one leg, or one eye. Such a 
child ■ has no power of strong personality, or of 
high achievement in the world. Every child ought 
to be trained to conform his will to the demands of 
duty ; but that is bending his will, not breaking it. 
Breaking a child's will is never in order. 

The term " will " as here employed applies to 
the child's faculty of choosing or deciding between 
two courses of action. Breaking a child's will is 
bringing the pressure of external force directly 
upon that will, and causing the will to give way 
under the pressure of that force. Training a child's 
will is bringing such influences to bear upon the 
child that he is ready to choose or decide in favor 
of the right course of action. 

To break a child's will is to crush out for the 
time being, and so far to destroy, the child's privi- 
lege of free choice ; it is to force him to an action 
against his choice, instead of inducing him to 
choose in the right direction. A child's will is his 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 39 

truest personality; the expression of his will in a 
free choice is the highest expression of his person- 
ality. And a child's personality is to be held sacred 
by God's representative who is over the child, even 
as God himself holds sacred the personality of 
every human being created in the image of God. 

God never says unqualifiedly to a human being, 
" You shall not exercise your faculty of choice 
between the way of life and the way of death ; you 
shall walk in the way which I know to be best for 
you." But, on the contrary, God says to every one 
(Deut. 30: 15): "See, I have set before thee this 
day life and good, and death and evil," — for thy 
choice. Here, as everywhere, God concedes to 
man the privilege of exercising his will-power in 
the direction of life and good, or of death and evil. 
The strictest Calvinist and the broadest Arminian 
are at one in their opinion so far. Whatever 
emphasis is laid, in their philosophy, on God's 
influencing or enabling the human will to its final 
choice, neither of them disputes the fact that man 
is actually permitted to use that will in the direction 



40 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

of his choice. " It is God that worketh in man to 
will and to work for His good pleasure." It is not 
that God worketh above man to crush out man's 
faculty of willing whether to act for or against His 
good pleasure. In other words, God has fore- 
ordained that every man shall have the freedom of 
his will — and take the consequences. 

It is true that God holds out before man, as an 
inducement to him in his choosing, the inevitable 
results of his choice. If he chooses good, life 
comes with it. If he chooses evil, death is its 
accompaniment. The rewards and the punish- 
ments are declared in advance ; but after all, and 
in spite of all, the choice is man's own. And every 
soul shall have eternally the destiny of its own 
choosing. The representative of God clothed with 
power, as he stood before the people of Israel, did 
not say, " You shall choose God's service now ; 
and if you deliberately refuse to do so, God will 
break your will so that you do do it; " but he said, 
*' If it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose 
you this day whom ye will serve (Josh. 24: 15). 



HINTS ON CHILD^TRAINING. 4 1 

As God, our wise and loving Father in heaven, 
deals with us his children, so we, as earthly fathers, 
should deal with our children. We should guard 
sacredly their privilege of personal choice ; and 
while using every proper means to induce them to 
choose aright, we should never, never, never force 
their choice, even into the direction of our intelli- 
gent preference for them. The final responsibility 
of a choice and of its consequences rests with the 
child, and not with the parent. 

A child's will ought to be strong for right-doing. 
If it be not so at the start, it is the parent's duty to 
guide, or train, it accordingly. But to break, or 
crush, a child's will, is inconsistent with the edu- 
cating and training of that will. A conflict be- 
tween a parent and a child, where the only 
question is, Whose will shall yield to the other ? 
is, after all, neither more nor less than a conflict 
of brute force. 

Whether, in any instance, the will of the parent 
be set on having his child commit some repulsive 
crime against which the child's moral nature recoils. 



42 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

or whether the will of the parent be set on the 
child's reciting a Bible text or saying a prayer, the 
mere conflict of wills as a conflict of wills is a con- 
flict of brute force ; and in such a conflict neither 
party ought to succeed, — for success in any such 
case is always a failure. If the parent really wills 
that the child shall do right, the parent's endeavor 
should be to have the child will in the same direc- 
tion. Merely to force one will into subjection to 
the other is, however, an injury both to the one 
who forces and to the one who submits. 

A hypothetical illustration may make this matter 
clearer. A father says to his strong-willed child : 
** Johnny, shut that door." Johnny says, ''I won't." 
The father says, "You shall." Johnny rejoins, " I 
won't." An issue is here made between two wills 
— the father's and the son's. Many a parent would 
suppose that in such a case the child's will ought 
to be broken, subjugated, forced, if need be, under 
the pressure of the father's will ; and the more 
conscientious the parent, the firmer is likely to be 
his conviction of duty accordingly. 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 43 

It is at such a point as this that the evil of break- 
ing a child's will, instead of training it, finds its 
foothold in many a Christian home. The father is 
determined not to yield his will to his child's will. 
The child is determined not to yield his will to his 
father's will. It is the old conflict between " an 
irresistible force and an immovable body." In such 
a case, brute force may compel the child to do that 
which he chooses not to do, just as the rack and 
thumb-scr.ews of the Inquisition could compel the 
tortured one to deny a belief which he chooses to 
adhere to ; but in the one case, as in the other, the 
victim of the torturing pressure is permanently 
harmed, while the cause of truth and right has 
been in no sense the gainer by the triumph. 
Oh, what if God should treat his children in 
that way! 

What, then, it may be asked, should be done 
with such a child in an issue like this ? It cer- 
tainly would have been better, it would have been 
far better, for the parent not to make a direct issue 
by following the child's first refusal with the 



44 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

unqualified declaration, "You shall." But with 
the issue once made, however unfortunately, then 
what ? Let the parent turn to the child in loving 
gentleness, — not then in severity, and never, never, 
never in anger, — and tell him tenderly of a better 
way than that which he is pursuing, urging him to 
a wiser, nobler choice. In most cases the very 
absence of any show of angry conflict on the 
father's part will prompt the child to choose to do 
that which he said he would not do. But if worst 
comes to worst (for we are here taking the extrem- 
est supposable issue, which ought indeed rarely, if 
ever, to occur), let the parent say to the child : 
*' Johnny, I shall have to give you your choice in 
this matter. You can either shut that door or 
take a whipping." Then a new choice is before 
the boy, and his will is free and unbroken for 
its meeting. 

Be it understood, the father has no right to say, 
" I will whip you until you shut that door ; " for 
that would be to deprive the boy of a choice, to 
deprive the boy of his will-power in the direction 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 45 

of his action: and that no parent is ever justified 
in doing. If the boy chooses to be whipped rather 
than to obey, the father must accept the result so 
far, and begin again for the next time ; although, 
of course, there must be no undue severity in a 
child's punishment; even the civil law forbids that. 
The father as a father is not entitled to have his 
will stand in the place of his child's will ; even 
though he is privileged to strive to bring the child 
to will in the same direction that the father's will 
trends. 

All the way along through his training-life, a 
child ought to know what are to be the legitimate 
consequences of his chosen action, in every case, 
and then be privileged to choose accordingly. 
There is a place for punishment in a child's train- 
ing, but punishment is a penalty attached to a 
choice ; it is not brute force applied to compel 
action against choice. No child ought ever to be 
punished, unless he understood, when he chose to 
do the wrong in question, that he was thereby 
incurring the penalty of that punishment. 



46 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

In most cases it is better, as has been said, for a 
parent to avoid a direct issue with a child, than to 
seek, or even than to recognize and meet, an issue. 
And in the endeavor to tr^in a child's will, there is 
often a gain in giving the child an alternative con- 
sequence of obedience or disobedience. That is 
God's way of holding out rewards and punish- 
ments. For example, a wise young mother was 
just giving her little boy a bit of candy which was 
peculiarly prized by him, when, in speaking to a 
lady visitor he called her by the familiar term used 
by older members of the family in addressing her. 
The mother reminded him of the manner in which 
he should speak to the lady. He refused to con- 
form to this. "Then I cannot let you have this 
candy," said the mother. "All right," was the 
wilful reply. " I'd rather go without the candy 
than call her what you tell me to." The mother 
turned quietly away, taking the candy with her. 
An hour later that child came to his mother, say- 
ing, " Mamma, perhaps you can give me that candy 
now; for I will always call that lady just what you 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 47 

tell me to." A few added words from the mother 
at that juncture settled that point for all time. 
Thenceforward the child did as he had thus been 
led to will to do. His will had not been broken, 
but it had been newly directed by judicious training. 
But, it may be asked, if a child be told by his 
mother to leave the room, at a time when it is pecu- 
liarly important that he should not remain there, and 
he says that he will not go, what shall be done with 
him ? Shall he be permitted to have his own way, 
against his own true welfare ? If the chief point 
be to get him out of the room, and there is no time 
just then for his training, the child can be carried 
out by main strength. But that neither breaks nor 
trains the child's will. It is not a triumph of will, 
but of muscle. The child, in such a case, leaves 
the room against his will, and in spite of it. His 
will has simply been ignored, not broken. And 
there are times when a child's bodily removal from 
one place to another is more important for the time 
being than is, just then, the child's will-training. 
Such would be the case if the house were on fire, 



48 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

or if the child were taken suddenly ill. But that 
is apart from the question of will-training or will- 
breaking. The distinction here noted ought not to 
be lost sight of in considering this question. 

If, however, in the case above cited, the purpose 
of the mother be to meet the issue which is there 
raised, and to have it settled once for all whose 
will shall triumph, right or wrong, the mother can 
bring the pressure of brute force to bear on the 
child's will, in order to its final breaking. Under 
that pressure, the child's life may go out before his 
will is broken. In many an instance of that sort, 
this has been the result. Or, again, the child's will 
may then be broken. If it be so, the child is 
harmed for life; and so is his mother. The one 
has come into a slavish submission to the conscien- 
tiously tyrannical demands of the other. Both 
have obtained wrong conceptions of parental 
authority, wrong conceptions of filial obedience, 
and wrong conceptions of the plan and methods 
of the Divine-Paternal government. But if, on the 
other hand, now be the time for teaching a child to 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING, Ar9 

use his own will aright, at the summons of one 
who is older and wiser than himself, and who is 
over him in the plan of God for his guidance and 
training, there is a better way than either the for- 
cing a child out of the room against his will, or the 
breaking of his will so that that will is powerless 
to prompt him to stay or to go. 

The course to be pursued in this case is that 
already suggested in the case of the child whose 
father told him to shut the door. Let the mother 
give herself, at once, to firm and gentle endeavors 
to bring that child to use his own will, freely and 
gladly, in the direction of her commands to him. 
If necessary, let there be no more of sleeping or 
eating in that home until that child, under the 
forceful pressure of wise counsel and of affectionate 
entreaty, has willed to do that which he ought to 
do, — has willed to be an obedient child. Here, 
again, is the difference between the wise training 
of the will, and the always unwise and unjustifiable 
breaking of the will. 

Even in the matter of dealing with the lower 



50 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

animals, it has been found that the old idea of 
" breaking " the will as a substitute for, or as a 
necessary precedent of, the "training" the will, is 
an erroneous one; and the remarkable power of 
such horse-trainers as Rarey and Gleason grows 
out of the fact that they are trainers, and not 
breakers, of horses. A standard work on Dog 
Training, by S. T. Hammond, is based on the idea, 
indicated in one of its titles, of " Training versus 
Breaking." It might seem, indeed, that the counsel 
of this latter writer, concerning the wise treatment 
of a young dog taken newly in hand for his train- 
ing, were given to a parent concerning the wise 
treatment of a young child when first taken in 
hand for this purpose. 

" Do not fail to abundantly caress him and speak 
kindly words," he says; "and never under any 
circumstances, no matter what the provocation, 
allow yourself to scold, or [in this early stage] 
strike him, as this is entirely at variance with our 
system, and is sure to result in the defeat of our 
plans. ... Be very gentle with him at all times. 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 5 I 

Carefully study his disposition, and learn all of 
his ways, that you may the more readily under- 
stand just how to manage him. You should be in 
perfect sympathy with him, and humor all his 
whims and notions, and endeavor to teach him that 
you truly love him. In a short time you will find 
that this love will be returned tenfold, and that he 
is ever anxiously watching for your coming, and 
never so happy as when in your presence and 
enjoying your caresses." This, be it borne in 
mind, is in a line of work that seeks to bring the 
entire will of the trained in loving subjection to 
the will of the trainer. And that which is none 
too high a standard for a young dog ought not 
to be deemed too high for attainment by a ra- 
tional child. 

Surely that which is found to be the best way for 
a trainer of dogs on the one hand, and which, on 
the other hand, is God's way with all his children, 
may fairly be recognized as both practicable and 
best for a human parent's dealing with his intelli- 
gent little ones. And all this is written by one 



52 HINTS ON CHILD-STRAINING. 

who in well-nigh forty years of parental life has 
tried more than one way in child -training, and 
who long ago learned by experience as well as by 
study that God's way in this thing is unmistakably 
the best way. 



VI. 

THE PLACE OF ''MUST' IN 
TRAINING, 



With all the modern improvements in methods 
of deahng with children, — and these improvements 
are many and great, — it is important to bear in 
mind that judicious discipline has an important 
part in the wise training of the young. Discipline 
is not everything in the sphere of child-training; 
but discipline is much, in that sphere. Discipline 
is an important factor in will-training; and will- 
training is an important factor in wise child-train- 
ing, although will-breaking is not. 

Formerly, discipline was the great feature, if not, 

indeed, the only feature, in the training of children. 

There was a time when children were not allowed 

to sit in the presence of their parents, or to speak 

to them unless they were first spoken to, or to have 

53 



54 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

a place with their parents at the home table or in 
the church pew ; when the approved mode of teach- 
ing was a primitive and very simple one. "They 
told a child to learn; and if he did not, they beat 
him." The school-days of children were then 
spoken of as "when they were under the rod." 
Even the occasional celebration of a holy day did 
not bring unalloyed delight to the little ones; as, 
for instance, " on Innocents' Day, an old custom of 
our ancestors was to flog the poor children in 
their beds, not as a punishment, but to impress on 
their minds the murder of the innocents." 

But all this is in the long past. For a century 
or more the progress of interest in and attention 
to the children has been steady and rapid. And 
now the best talent of the world is laid under con- 
tribution for the little ones. In the provisions of 
song and story and pictures and toys and games, 
as well as in school buildings and school appli- 
ances and school methods, the place of the chil- 
dren is foremost. At home they certainly do not 
hesitate to sit down when and where they please, 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 55 

or to speak without waiting to be spoken to. In- 
deed, there are parents who wonder if they will 
ever get a chance to sit down while their children 
are in the house; or if ever those children will 
stop asking questions. Meanwhile in secular 
schools and in Sunday-schools the aim seems to 
be to make learning as attractive as possible to 
children, and to relieve study, as far as may be, of 
all tediousness and discomfort. 

Now, that this state of things is, on the whole, a 
decided improvement over that which it displaced, 
there is no room for fair doubt. Yet there is 
always a danger of losing sight of one important 
truth in the effort to give new and due prominence 
to another. Hence attention should be given to 
the value of judicious discipline in the training of 
children. Children need to learn how to do things 
Vv^hich they do not want to do, when those things 
ought to be done. Older people have to do a 
great many things from a sense of duty. Unless 
children are trained to recognize duty as more 
binding than inclination, they will suffer all their 



56 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

lives through from their lack of discipline in this 
direction. 

Children ought to be trained to get up in the 
morning at a proper hour, for some other reason 
than that this is to be " the maddest, merriest day 
in all the glad new year." They ought to learn to 
go to bed at a fitting time, whether they are sleepy 
or not. Their hours of eating, and the quality and 
quantity of their food, ought to be regulated by 
some other standard than their inclinations. In 
their daily life there must be a place for tasks as 
tasks, for times of study under the pressure of 
stern duty, in the effort to train them to do their 
right work properly. It is not enough to have 
children learn only lessons which they enjoy, and 
this at times and by methods which are peculiarly 
pleasing to them. President Porter, of Yale, said, 
in substance, that the chief advantage of the col- 
lege curriculum is, that it trains a young man to 
do what he ought to do, when he ought to do it, 
whether he wants to do it or not. Any course of 
training for a young person that fails to accom- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 57 

plish thus much, is part of a sadly imperfect 
system. 

There are few, if any, children who do not need 
to be trained to apply themselves earnestly to occu- 
pations which they dislike. The tastes of some 
children are very good, and of others very poor; 
but nearly all children have positive inclinations in 
one direction or in another. They like playing 
better than working or reading; or they prefer 
reading or working to playing. Some prefer to 
remain indoors; others prefer to be outside. Some 
want to occupy themselves always in mechanical 
pursuits; others would always be at games of one 
sort or another. Some enjoy being with com- 
panions; others prefer to be by themselves; yet 
others would attach themselves to one or two per- 
sons only, having little care for the society of any- 
body else. In their studies, children show, perhaps 
very early, a decided fancy for geography, or his- 
tory, or mathematics, or the languages, and a pro- 
nounced distaste for other branches of learning. 
Now, whether a child's tastes are elevated or unre- 



58 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

fined, in the direction of better or more undesirable 
pursuits, he ought not to be permitted to follow 
always his own fancies, or to do only that which 
he really likes to do. 

The parent or the teacher must decide what pur- 
suit of activity, or what branch of study, is best for 
each several child, and must train him to it accord- 
ingly. In making this decision, it is important to 
consider fully the tastes and peculiarities of the 
particular child under training; but the decision 
itself must rest with the guardian rather than with 
the child. Whatever place " elective " studies may 
properly have in a university curriculum, there is 
need of positive limitations to the elective system 
of duties in the nursery and in the home sphere 
generally. 

Hardly anything can be more important in the 
mental training of a child than the bringing him 
to do what he ought to do, and to do it in its 
proper time, whether he enjoys doing it or not. 
The measure of a child's ability to do this be- 
comes, in the long run, the measure of his practical 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 59 

efficiency in whatever sphere of Hfe he labors. 
No man can work always merely in the line of his 
personal preferences. He must do many things 
which are distasteful to him. Unless he was 
trained as a child to do such things persistently, 
he cannot do them to advantage when they are 
upon him as a necessity. Nor can any man do 
his best work as well as he ought to, if he works 
always and only in one line. A one-sided man is 
not a well-balanced man, even though his one side 
be the right side. It is better to use the dextral 
hand than the sinister, but it is certainly preferable 
to be ambidextrous. 

There is little danger that intelligent Christian 
parents or teachers will at this day refuse to con- 
sider duly a child's tastes and peculiarities, in their 
efforts to instruct and train him. While, however, 
they are making study attractive and life enjoyable 
to a child, parents should see to it that the child 
learns to keep quiet at specified times, and to be 
active at other times ; that he studies assigned les- 
sons, does -^ set tasks, denies himself craved indul- 



6o HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

gences; that he goes and comes, that he stands 
or moves, at designated hours, — not because he 
wants to do these things, but because he must. 
Now, as of old, " it is good for a man that he bear 
the yoke in his youth." 



VII. 
DENYING A CHILD WISELY. 



One of the hardest and one of the most impor- 
tant things in the training of a loved child is to 
deny him that which he longs for, and which we 
could give to him, but which he would better not 
have. It is very pleasant to gratify a child. There 
is real enjoyment in giving to him what he asks for, 
when we can do it prudently. But wise withhold- 
ing is quite as important as generous giving in the 
proper care of a child. 

Next to denying a child necessary food and 
raiment, for the sustenance of veiy life, the un- 
kindest treatment of a child is to give him every- 
thing that he asks for. Every parent recognizes 
this truth within certain limits, and therefore refuses 
an unsheathed knife, or a percussion cartridge, or 

a cup of poison, to a child who cries for it. But 

6i 



62 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

the breadth and the full significance of the prin- 
ciple involved are not so generally accepted as 
they should be. 

A child ought to be denied, by his parents, many 
things which in themselves are harmless. It is an 
injury to any child to have always at the table the 
dishes which he likes best ; to have uniformly the 
cut or the portion which he prefers; to have every 
plaything which his parents can afford to give 
him; to dress — even within their means — just as 
he wants to; and to go, with them, where and 
when he pleases. That child who has never a 
legitimate desire ungratified is poorly fitted for the 
duties and the trials of every-day life in the world. 
He does not, indeed, enjoy himself now as he might 
hope to through a different training. It is sadly 
to a parent's discredit when a child can truly say, 
" My father, or my mother, never denied me any 
pleasure which it was fairly in his, or her, power 
to bestow." 

It is because of the evil results of not wisely 
denying the little ones, that an only child is in 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 63 

so many instances spoken of as a spoiled child. 
There is but one to give to in that household. He 
can have just so much more, than if there were 
half a dozen children to share it; and, as a rule, 
he gets it all. Parents give to him freely; so do 
grandparents, and so do uncles and aunts. He 
hardly knows what self-denial or want is. His 
very fulness palls upon him. It is not easy to 
surprise him w^ith an unexpected pleasure. He 
not only is liable to grow selfish and exacting, 
but at the best he lacks all the enjoyment which 
comes of the occasional gratification of a desire 
which has been long felt without the expectation 
of its being speedily met. 

But it is by no means necessary that an only 
child should be spoiled in training. Some of the 
best trained children in the world have been only 
children. Many a parent is more faithful and dis- 
creet in securing to his or her only child the bene- 
fits of self-denial than is many another with half a 
dozen children to care for. But whether there be 
one child or more in the family, the lesson of wise 



64 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

denial is alike important to the young, and the re- 
sponsibility of its teaching should be recognized 
by the parent. 

Few grown persons can have everything they 
want, everything that love can give, everything 
that money can buy. Most of them have many 
reasonable wishes ungratified, many moderate de- 
sires unfilled. They have to get along without a 
great many things which others have, and which 
they would like. It is probable that their children 
will be called to similar experiences when they 
must finally shift for themselves. Their children 
ought, therefore, to be in training for this experi- 
ence now. It is largely the early education which 
gives one proper control over himself and his 
desires. If in childhood one is taught to deny 
himself, to yield gracefully much that he longs for, 
to enjoy the little that he can have in spite of the 
lack of a great deal which he would like to have, 
his lot will be an easier and a happier one, when 
he comes to the realities of maturer life, than would 
be possible to him if, as a child, he had only to 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING 65 

express a reasonable wish, to have it promptly 
gratified. 

For this reason it is that men who were the chil- 
dren of the rich are so often at a disadvantage, in 
the battle oi life, in comparison with those who have 
risen from comparative poverty. Their parents' 
wealth, so freely at their disposal, increased the num- 
ber of wants which they now think must be grati- 
fied ; and their pampering in childhood so ener- 
vated them for the struggles and endurances which 
are, at the best, a necessity in ordinary business 
pursuits, that they are easily distanced by those 
who were in youth disciplined through enforced 
self-denial, and made strong by enduring hard- 
ness, and by finding contentment with a little. It 
is a great pity that the full and free gifts of a loving 
parent should prove a hindrance to a child's happi- 
ness, a barrier to his success in life; that the very 
abundance of the parent's giving should tend to 
the child's poverty and unhappiness ! Yet this 
state of things is in too many instances an un- 
deniable fact. 

5 



(i6 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

Children of the present day — especially children 
of parents in comfortable worldly circumstances — 
are far more likely than were their fathers and 
mothers to lack lessons of self-denial. The stan- 
dard of living is very different now from a genera- 
tion since. There were few parents in any com- 
munity in this country fifty years ago who could 
buy whatever they wanted for their children ; or, 
indeed, for themselves. There was no such free- 
ness of purchases for children, for the table, for the 
house or the household, as is now common on 
every side. Children then did not expect a new 
suit of clothes every few months. Often they had 
old ones made over for them, from those of their 
parents or of their elder brothers and sisters. A 
present from the toy-shop or bookstore was a 
rarity in those days. There was not much choos- 
ing by children what they would eat as they sat 
down at the family table. There was still less of 
planning by them for a summer journey with their 
parents to a mountain or seaside resort. Self-de- 
nial, or more or less of personal privation, came as a 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 6/ 

necessity to almost every child in the younger days 
of many who are now on the stage of active life. 
But how different now! 

The average child of the present generation re- 
ceives more presents and more indulgences from 
his parents in any one year of his life than the 
average child of a generation ago received in all 
the years of his childhood. Because of this new 
standard, the child of to-day expects new things, 
as a matter of course ; he asks for them, in the 
belief that he will receive them. In consequence 
of their abundance, he sets a smaller value upon 
them severally. It is not possible that he should 
think as highly of any one new thing, out of a hun- 
dred coming to him in rapid succession, as he would 
of the only gift of an entire year. 

A boy of nowadays can hardly prize his new 
bicycle, or his "double-ripper" sled, after all the 
other presents he has received, as his father prized 
a little wagon made of a raisin-box, with wheels of 
ribbon-blocks, which was his only treasure in the 
line of locomotion. A little girl cannot have as 



6S HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

profound enjoyment in her third wax doll of the 
year, with eyes which open and shut, as her mother 
had with her one clumsy doll of stuffed rags or of 
painted wood. A new child's book was a wonder 
a generation since; it is now hardly more to one 
of our children than the evening paper is to the 
father of the family. It is now hard work to give 
a new sensation — or, at all events, to make a per- 
manent impression — by the bestowal of a gift of 
any sort on a child. It would be far easier to 
surprise and to impress many a child by refusing 
to give to him what he asked for and expected; 
and that treatment would in some cases be greatly 
to a child's advantage. 

A distinctive feature of the child-training of the 
ancient Spartans was the rigid discipline of con- 
stant self-denial, to which the child was subjected 
from infancy onward. And this feature of child- 
training among that people had much to do with 
giving to the Spartans their distinguishing charac- 
teristics of simplicity of manners, of powers of 
endurance, and of dauntless bravery. The best 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 6g 

primitive peoples everywhere have recognized the 
pre-eminent importance of this feature of child- 
training. Its neglect has come only with the 
growth in luxury among peoples of the highest 
material civilization. The question is an impor- 
tant one, whether it is well to lose all the advan- 
tages of this method of training, simply because 
it is not found to be a necessity as a means of 
sustaining physical life, where wealth abounds 
so freely. 

It is not that a child is to be denied what he 
wants, merely for the sake of the denial itself; but 
it is that a child ought not to have what he wants 
merely because he wants it. It is not that there 
is a necessary gain in a denial to a child ; but it is 
that when a denial to a child is necessary, there is 
an added gain to him through his finding that he 
must do without what he longs for. It is every 
parent's duty to deny a child many things which 
he wants ; to teach him that he must get along 
without a great many things which seem very 
desirable; to train him to self-denial and endur- 



JO HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. Jj 

ance, at the table, in the play-room ; with com- 
panions, and away from them: and the doing of 
this duty by the parent brings a sure advantage to 
the child. Whatever else he has, a child ought 
not to lack this element of a wise training. 



VIII. 
HONORING A CHILDS INDIVIDUALITY. 



A child is liable to be looked upon as if he were 
simply one child among many children, a speci- 
men representative of childhood generally ; but 
every child stands all by himself in the world as 
an individual, with his own personality and char- 
acter, with his own thoughts and feelings, his own 
hopes and fears and possibilities, his own relations 
to his fellow-beings and to God. This truth is 
often realized by a child before his parents realize 
it; and if it be unperceived and unrecognized by 
his parents, they are thereby shut off from the 
opportunity of doing for him much that can be 
done by them only as they give due honor to their 
child's individuality as a child... 

A little babe is not a mere bit of child-material, 

to be worked up by outside efforts and influences 

71 



72 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

into a child-reality ; but he is already a living 
organism, with all the possibilities of his highest 
manhood working within him toward their inde- 
pendent development. Here is the difference, on a 
lower plane, between a mass of clay being molded 
by the sculptor's hands into a statue of grace and 
beauty, and a seed of herb or tree containing 
within itself the germ of a new and peculiar indi- 
vidual specimen of its own unchanging species. 
An acorn is more than the fruit of the oak that 
bore it; it is the germ of another oak, like, and yet 
unlike, all the oaks that the world has known 
before the growth of this one. So, also, a child is 
more than the mere child of his earthly parents ; 
he is, in embryo, a man with characteristics and 
qualities such as his parents could never attain to, 
and which, it may be, the world has never before 
seen equaled. 

The possibilities of Moses, who was to put his 
impress upon the world's character, were in the 
Hebrew babe, as his loving mother laid him ten- 
derly in the pitch-daubed basket of papyrus, to 



I 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 73 

hide him away among the flags of the Nile-border, 
as they were not in any native babe of the house- 
hold of Pharaoh ; and if his mother had any intui- 
tive womanly sense of his grand future in the 
providence of God, her zeal and faith in his behalf 
were quickened and inspired accordingly. And so 
it has been all along the ages ; the germs of power 
and achievement were already in the babe, who was 
afterward known as Plato, or Caesar, or Muhammad, 
or Charlemagne, or Columbus, or Shakespeare, or 
Washington. And who will doubt that many a 
germ of such possibility in a young child has been 
quickened or repressed, according as that child's 
parents have perceived and honored, or have failed 
to realize and to foster, the best that was involved 
in the child's individuality? 

It was to the credit of the high-priest Eli, that 
he perceived that the child Samuel was capable of 
receiving communications from the Lord, such as 
were denied to the possessor of Urim and Thum- 
mim ; and that he honored the child's individuality 
so far as to encourage him to declare the message 



74 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

that God had sent by him ; instead of treating the 
child as one who could receive nothing from God, 
save as it came to him through the medium of his 
guardians and seniors. This spirit it was that 
prompted Trebonius to bare his head as he entered 
the school-room where he was looked up to as the 
teacher; because, as he suggested, he recognized 
in every child before him there the possibility of 
lofty attainment in his developed individuality. 
And it can hardly be doubted that this attitude of 
the teacher Trebonius had its measure of influ- 
ence in bringing to its fruition the germinal power 
in his pupil Martin Luther. Trebonius and Eli 
are — so far, at least — a pattern to the parents of 
to-day. 

It is not merely that the child is to be the pos- 
sessor of a marked and distinctive individuality, 
and that therefore he is to be honored for his possi- 
bilities in that direction ; but it is that lie already is 
the possessor of such an individuality, and that he 
is worthy of honor for that which he has and is at 
the present time. Many a child, while a child, is 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 75 

the superior of his parents in the basis and scope 
of character, in the attributes of genius, and in the 
instincts of high spiritual perception. This is the 
true order of things in the progress of God's plans 
for the race ; the better is in the coming genera- 
tions, not in the past. But even where the child is 
not the superior, he is always the peer in individu- 
ality of those to whom he looks up with honoring 
reverence as his parents, and he is entitled to recog- 
nition by them in that peership. 

Every one who recalls clearly his child-time 
thoughts and feelings, remembers that even in his 
earliest days he had his own standpoint of observa- 
tion and reflection; that he was conscious of his 
individual relations to others and to God ; and that, 
in a sense, his independent outlook and his inde- 
pendent uplook as an individual were the same then 
as now, in kind, although not in degree. He also 
Remembers that, as a child, he was often made to 
feel that his individuality was not fully recognized 
by others, but that it was frequently ignored or 
trenched upon by those who took it for granted 



*j6 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

that, because he was still a child, he had as yet no 
truly individual position, attitude, and rights in the 
world. Yet it is not an easy thing for a parent of 
to-day to bear always in mind that every child of 
his is as truly an individual as he was when he was 
a child. 

In little things, as in larger, a child's individuality 
is liable to be overlooked, or to be disregarded. 
A little boy was taken alarmingly ill one day. For 
several hours his loving mother watched him anx- 
iously. The next day he was in his accustomed 
health again. His mother, with the evident thought 
that a child could have no comprehension like a 
parent's of such a state of things as that, said to 
him, tenderly: "My dear boy, you don't know 
how sick you were yesterday." " Oh, yes ! I do, 
dear mamma," he answered ; " I know a great deal 
better than you do; for I was the one that was 
sick." And many a child has the thought that was 
in that child's mind, when he is spoken to as 
though he must get all his ideas of his own feelings 
and conditions and needs from some one who is 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 77 

supposed to represent him better than he can rep- 
resent himself — while he is still in childhood. 

It is much the same in the matter of personal 
rights, as in the matter of personal feelings. A 
child finds that his individuality is constantly lost 
sight of, because he is a child ; as it ought not to 
be. A little fellow who had been given a real 
watch, was conscious of an advance in his rel'ative 
position by that possession. His uncle, having 
taken his own watch to the watchmaker's, asked 
the loan of the little fellow's watch for the time 
being, saying that he could not get along without 
one. " Can't you get along without a watch ? " 
asked the nephew. " No, I cannot," replied the 
uncle. " If I had mine at the watchmaker's, would 
you lend me yours till mine came back? " was the 
little fellow's searching inquiry. **Why, no; I 
don't suppose I would," replied the other. " But 
then, you know, I'm a man, and you are a boy." 
"Well, then," said the individual boy to the indi- 
vidual man ; " if you can't get along without a 
watch, and you wouldn't lend me yours if I needed 



78 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

it, 1 can't get along without a watch, and I can't 
let you have mine." 

Now, the trouble in that case was that the boy's 
individuality was not sufficiently recognized and 
honored by the manner of that request for his 
watch. It seemed to be taken fof granted that, 
because he was a child, he had no such rights in 
his own possessions as a man has in his, and that 
he put no such value on that which he had, as a 
man would be sure to put on his belongings. 
Against that assumption the child quite naturally, 
and with a good show of logic, resolutely asserted 
himself If, on the other hand, the boy had been 
appealed to as an equal, to render a favor to the 
other because of a special and a clearly explained 
need, there is no reason to doubt that he would 
have been prompt to respond to it, with a feeling 
of satisfaction in being able to render that favor. 

Just here is where so many children are 
deprived of their rights as individuals, by incon- 
siderate parents or others. When seats are lacking 
for new comers in a room or a street-car, and two 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 79 

or three children are seated together by themselves 
in absorbing chat, the temptation is to speak 
quickly to the little ones, telling them to vacate 
those seats for their elders, in a tone that seems to 
indicate that a child has no rights in comparison 
with a grown person; instead of showing by the 
very manner of address that the children's attention 
is called to their privilege of showing courtesy to 
their elders. In the one case, every child of that 
party feels aggrieved through being made to feel 
that his rights are not recognized as rights. In 
the other case, he is gratified by the implied confi- 
dence in his gentlemanliness, and in his readiness 
to yield his rights gracefully. A child's rights as 
an individual are as positive and as sacred as a 
man's ; and it is never proper to ignore these rights 
in a child, any more than it would be in a man. 

When a child shows an unexpected interest in a 
subject of conversation between adults, it is not 
fair for the adults to brush aside the child's ques- 
tions or comments in a way that seems to say, " Oh ! 
you are only a child. Your opinions are of no 



80 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

account. This is a matter for real people to think 
and talk about." Yet how common a thing it is 
for parents to treat their children in this way ; and 
what a mistake it is ! If, indeed, the subject be one 
that is fairly beyond a child's grasp, it is quite 
proper to give the child to understand this fact, 
without any lack of respect for his individuality; 
but under no circumstances is it right to ignore 
that individuality at such a time. 

The deeper the theme of converse, and the pro- 
founder the thought involved in it, the greater the 
probability of a chiUd's freshness and life in its con- 
sidering, if he indicates an appreciative interest in 
its discussion. It is not merely in the stoiy of the 
child Samuel that there is a gleam of childhood's 
possibilities in the direction of closer communion 
with God than is granted to ordinary manhood ; 
but all the teachings of Scripture and of human 
experience tend to the disclosure and confirmation 
of this same truth. "Verily I say unto you," says 
our Lord, "Except ye turn, and become as little 
children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 8l 

of heaven." And again : " See that ye despise not 
one of these Httle ones ; for I say unto you, that 
in heaven their angels do always behold the face of 
my Father which is in heaven." And there is an 
echo of these Divine words in the familiar teachings 
of the Christian poet of nature: 

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing Boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows. — 

He sees it in his joy ; 
The """outh, who daily farther from the East 
Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended ; 
At length the Man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day." 

There is, indeed, a possibility of retaining the 
child-freshness of acquaintance with spiritual truths 
even into manhood and through all one's life. 
That possibility every parent ought to strive to 
attain to. "Whosoever therefore shall humble 
himself as this little child," said our Lord, as he 



82 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

pointed to a veritable human little one, " the same 
is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." And 
he who is greatest through being most child-like, 
will be readiest to recognize the individuality and 
the glorious possibilities of each and every child 
committed to his charge. Even while training a 
child, he will learn from the child ; and so he and 
his child will grow together toward the measure of 
the stature of the fulness of Christ. 



IX. 

LETTING ALONE AS A MEANS 
OF CHILD-TRAINING. 



Not doing is always as important, in its time 
and place, as doing; and this truth is as applica- 
ble in the realm of child-training as elsewhere. 
Child-training is a necessity, but there is a danger 
of over-doing in the line of child-training. The 
neglect of child-training is a great evil. Over- 
doing in the training of a child may be even a 
greater evil. Both evils ought to be avoided. In 
order to their avoidance, their existence and limits 
as evils must be recognized. 

Peculiarly is it the case that young parents who 

are exceptionally conscientious, and exceptionally 

desirous of being wise and faithful in the discharge 

of their parental duties, are liable to err in the 

direction of over-doing in the training of their 

83 



84 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

children. It is not that they are lacking in love 
and tenderness toward their little ones, or that 
they are naturally inclined to severity as discipli- 
narians ; but it is that their mistaken view of the 
methods and limitations of wise child-training im- 
pels them to an injudicious course of watchful 
strictness with their children, even while that course 
runs counter to their affections and desires as 
parents. Their very love and fidelity cause them 
to harm their children by over-doing in their 
training, even more than the children of parents 
less wise and faithful are harmed by a lack of sys- 
tematic training. It is, in fact, because they are 
so desirous of well-doing, that these parents over- 
do in the line of their best endeavors for their 
children. 

A young father who was an earnest student of 
methods of child-training, and who sincerely de- 
sired to be faithful in the training of his first child 
at any cost to his feelings of loving tenderness 
toward that child, made a mistake in this direction, 
and received a lesson accordingly. His child was 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 85 

as full of affection as she was of life and spirit. 
She had not yet learned what she might do and 
what she might not do, but she was rapidly de- 
veloping impulses and tastes in various directions ; 
and her strength of personal character was show- 
ing itself in her positiveness of purpose in the line 
of her tastes and impulses for the hour. Her 
father had heard much about the importance of 
parental training and discipline, but had heard 
nothing about the danger of over-doing in this 
line; hence he deemed it his duty to be con- 
stantly directing or checking his child, so as to 
keep her within the limits of safety and duty as 
he saw it. 

To his surprise and regret, the father found that, 
while his little daughter was not inclined to way- 
wardness or disobedience, she was steadily coming 
into a state of chronic resistance to his attempts at 
her stricter governing. This resistance was pas- 
sive rather than active, but it was none the less real 
for that. She would not refuse to obey, but she 
would not be ready or prompt to obey. She would 



86 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

not be aroused to anger or show any open sign of 
disrespect, but she would seem unable or unwilling 
to act as she was told to. Kind words and earnest 
entreaties were of no avail at this point, neither 
were they ever resented or explicitly rejected. If 
punishment was attempted, she submitted to it with 
a good grace, but it seemed to have no effect in 
the way of removing the cause of original trouble. 
The father never, indeed, lost his temper, or grew 
less loving toward his child; he prayed for guid- 
ance, and he gave his best thoughts to the problem 
before him; but all to no apparent purpose. The 
matter grew more and more serious, and he was 
more and more bewildered. 

One day, after a serious struggle with his little 
daughter over a matter that would have been a 
trifling one except as it bore on the question of 
her character and welfare, the father left his house 
with a heavy heart, and almost in despair over this 
question of wise child-training. At the door he 
met a friend, much older than himself, with whom 
he had been a co-worker in several spheres of Chris- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 8/ 

tian activity. Seeing his troubled face, that friend 
asked him the cause of his evident anxiety, and the 
young father opened his heart, and told the story of 
his trouble. '' Isn't the trouble, that you are over- 
doing in the training of your child?" asked the 
listener; and then he went on to give his own 
experience in illustration of the meaning of this 
question. 

"My first child was my best child," he said; 
" and I harmed her for life by over-doing in her 
training, as I now see, in looking back over my 
course with her. I thought I must be training her- 
all the time, and I forced issues with her, and took 
notice of little things, when I would have done 
better to let her alone. So she was checked un- 
duly, and shut up within herself by my course 
with her; and she grew up in a rigid and unnatu- 
ral constraint which ought not to have been hers. 
I saw my mistake afterwards, and I allowed my 
other children more freedom, by letting them alone 
except when they must be interfered with ; and 
I've seen the benefit of this course. My rule with 



SS HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

all my children, since my first, has been to avoid 
an issue with them on a question of discipline 
whenever I could do so safely. And the less 
show of training there is, in bringing up a child, 
the better, as I see it." 

This was a revelation to that young father. He 
determined at once to try to act on its suggestions, 
since the opposite course had been such a signal 
failure in his hands. When again in his home, an 
opportunity for an experiment was soon before 
him. His little daughter came into the room, 
through a door which she had been repeatedly 
told to push to, after she had passed it. With- 
out any special thought on the subject, the father, 
who sat writing at his desk, said, as often before: 
*' Push the door to, darling." And, as often before, 
the child stood quiet and firm, as if in expectation 
of a new issue on that point. The counsel of the 
morning came into the father's mind, and he said 
gently, "You needn't shut the door to, darling, if 
you don't want to. Papa will do it," and at once 
he stepped and closed the door, returning after- 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 89 

wards to his desk, without a word of rebuke to 
his child. 

This was a new experience to the poor over- 
taxed child. She stood in perplexed thought for 
a few minutes. Then she came lovingly to her 
father, and, asking to be taken up on his knee, she 
clasped her arms about his neck, and said : " Dear 
papa, I'm sorry I didn't shut that door. I will next 
time. Please forgive me, dear papa." And that 
was the beginning of a new state of things in that 
home. The father had learned that there was a 
danger of over-doing in the work of child-training, 
and his children were afterwards the gainers by 
his added knowledge of the needs and tastes of 
childhood. 

In the case of this father, the trouble had been 
that he made too many direct issues with his child 
on questions of authority and obedience, and that 
thus he provoked conflicts which might have been 
wisely avoided. After this new experience he was 
very cautious at this point, and he soon found that 
his child could be trained to obey without so often 



go HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 

considering the possibility of resisting or question- 
ing parental authority. When, in any case, an 
issue had to be accepted, the circumstances were 
so well considered that the child as well as the 
parent saw that its right outcome was the only 
outcome. The error of this father had been the 
error of a thoughtful and deliberate disciplinarian, 
who was as yet but partially instructed ; but there 
are also thoughtless and inconsiderate parents 
who harm, if they do not ruin, their children's dis- 
positions by over-doing in what they call child- 
training. And this error is even worse than 
the other. 

There are many parents who seem to suppose 
that their chief work in the training of a child is 
to be incessantly commanding or prohibiting ; tell- 
ing the child to do this or to do that, and not to 
do this, that, or the other. But this nagging a 
child is not training a child ; on the contrary, it is 
destructive of all training on the part of him who 
is addicted to it. It is not the driver who is train- 
ing a horse, but one who neither is trained nor can 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 9I 

train, who is all the time "yanking" at the reins, 
or " thrapping " them up and down. Neither 
parent nor driver, in such a case, can do as much 
in the direction of training by doing incessantly, 
as by letting alone judiciously. "Don't be always 
don't-ing," is a bit of counsel to parents that can 
hardly be emphasized too strongly. Don't be 
always directing, is a companion precept to this. 
Both injunctions are needful, with the tendency 
of human nature as it is. 

Of course, there must be explicit commanding 
and explicit prohibiting in the process of child- 
training ; but there must also be a large measure 
of wise letting alone. When to prohibit and 
when to command, in this process, are questions 
that demand wisdom, thought, and character ; and 
more wisdom, more thought, and more character, 
are needful in deciding the question when to let 
the child alone. The training of a child must 
go on incessantly ; but a large share of the time 
it will best go on by the operation of influences, 
inspirations, and inducements, in the direction 



92 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

of a right standard held persistently before the 
child, without anything being said on the sub- 
ject to the child at every step in his course of 
progress. Doing nothing, as a child-trainer, is, in 
Its order, the best kind of doing. 



X. 

TRAINING A CHILD TO 
SELF-CONTROL. 



An inevitable struggle between the individual and 
the several powers that go to make his individu- 
ality, begins in every child at his very birth, and 
continues so long as his life in the flesh continues. 
On the outcome of this struggle depends the ulti- 
mate character of him who struggles. It is, to 
him, bondage or mastery, defeat or triumph, failure 
or success, as a result of the battling that cannot 
be evaded. And, as a matter of fact, the issue 
of the life-long battle is ordinarily settled in child- 
hood. 

A child who is trained to self-control — as a child 

may be — is already a true man in his fitness for 

manly self-mastery. A man who was not trained, 

in childhood, to self-control, is hopelessly a child 

93 



94 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

in his combat with himself; and he can never 
regain the vantage-ground which his childhood 
gave to him, in the battle which then opened before 
him, and in the thick of which he still finds him- 
self It is in a child's earlier struggles with himself 
that help can easiest be given to him, and that it is 
of greatest value for his own developing of charac- 
ter. Yet at that time a child has no such sense of 
his need in this direction as is sure to be his in 
maturer years; hence it is that it rests with the 
parent to decide, while the child is still a child, 
whether the child shall be a slave to himself, or a 
master of himself; whether his life, so far, shall be 
worthy or unworthy of his high possibilities of 
manhood. 

A child's first struggle with himself ought to be 
in the direction of controlling his impulse to give 
full play to his lungs and his muscles at the 
prompting of his nerves. As soon as the nerves 
make themselves felt, they prompt a child to cry, 
to thrash his arms, to kick, and to twist his body 
on every side, at the slightest provocation, — or at 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 95 

none. Unless this prompting be checked, the 
child will exhaust himself in aimless exertion, and 
will increase his own discomfort by the very means 
of its exhibit. A control of himself at this point 
is possible to a child, at an age while he is yet 
unable to speak, or to understand what is spoken 
to him. If a parent realizes that the child must be 
induced to control himself, and seeks in loving 
firmness to cause the child to realize that same 
truth, the child will fed the parent's conviction, 
and will yield to it, even though he cannot compre- 
hend the meaning of his parent's words as words. 
The way of helping the child will be found, by the 
parent who wills to help him. To leave a child to 
himself in these earliest struggles with himself, is 
to put him at a sad disadvantage in all the future 
combats of his life's warfare; while to give him 
wise help in these earliest struggles, is to give him 
help for all the follov/ing struggles. 

As soon as a child is able to understand what is 
said to him, he ought to be taught and trained to 
control his impulse to cry and writhe under the 



96 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

pressure of physical pain. When a child has fallen 
and hurt himself, or has cut his finger, or has 
burned his hand, or has been hit by an ill-directed 
missile, it is natural for him to shriek with pain and 
fright, and it is natural for his tender-hearted 
mother to shrink from blaming him just then for 
indulging in this display of grief But ever at such 
a time as this, a mother has an unmistakable duty 
of helping her child to gain a measure of control 
over himself, so as to repress his cries and to mod- 
erate his exhibit of disturbed feeling. 

A child can come to exercise self-control under 
such circumstances as these. His mother can 
enable him to do this. It is better for both child 
and mother that he should have her help accord- 
ingly. Because of the lack of help just here, 
many a child is a sufferer through life in his inabil- 
ity to control himself under physical pain. And 
because of this inability many a person has actually 
lost his life, at a time when calmness of mind was 
essential to that endurance of physical suffering 
which was the only hope of prolonged existence. 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 97 

Because he was not trained to control his nerves, 
he is hopelessly controlled by his nerves. 

Coaxing and rewarding a child into quiet at such 
a time is not what is needed; but it is the encour- 
aging a child into an intelligent control of himself, 
that is to be aimed at by the wise parent. It is 
only a choice between evils that substitutes a candy- 
paid silence for a noisy indulgence of feeling on a 
child's part. A good illustration of the unwise 
way of inducing children to seem to have control 
of themselves, is given in the familiar story of the 
little fellow throwing himself on the floor and 
kicking and yelling, and then crying out, " Grand- 
ma, grandma, I want to be pacified. Where are 
your sugar-plums?" 

Dr. Bushnell, protesting against this method of 
coaxing a child out of a state of irritation, in a fit 
of ill-nature, by " dainties that please the taste," 
says forcefully, " It must be a very dull child that 
will not cry and fret a great deal, when it is so 
pleasantly rewarded. Trained, in this manner, to 
play ill-nature for sensation's sake, it will go on 

7 



98 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

rapidly, in the course of double attainment, and 
will be very soon perfected in the double character 
of an ill-natured, morbid sensualist, and a feigning 
cheat besides. By what methods, or means, can 
the great themes of God and religion get hold of 
a soul that has learned to be governed only by 
rewards of sensation, paid to affectations of grief 
and deliberate actings of ill-nature ?" 

That control of himself which is secured by a 
child in his intelligent repression of an impulse to 
cry and writhe in physical pain, is of advantage to 
the child in all his life -long struggle with himself; 
and he should be trained in the habit of making 
his self-control available to him in this struggle. 
" I buffet my body [or give it a black eye] and 
bring it into bondage; lest by any means, after that 
I have preached to others, I myself should be 
rejected," says the Apostle Paul; as if in recogni- 
tion of the fact that a man's battle with his body is 
a vital conflict, all his life through. Every child 
needs the help of his parents in gaining control 
over his body, instead of allowing his body to gain 



I 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 99 

the control of him. The appetites and passions 
and impellings of the outer man are continually- 
striving for the mastery over the inner man; and 
unless one is trained to master these instead of 
being mastered by them, he is sure to fail in his 
life-struggle. 

A parent ought to help his child to refrain from 
laughing when he ought not to laugh; from crying 
when he ought not to cry; from speaking when he 
ought not to speak ; from eating that which he 
ought not to eat, even though the food be imme- 
diately before him ; from running about when it is 
better for him to remain quiet ; and to be ready to 
say and to do just that which it is best for him to 
say and do, at the time when it needs to be said 
and done. Self-control in all these things is possi- 
ble to a child. Wise training on the parent's part 
can secure it. The principle which is operative 
here, is operative in every sphere of human exist- 
ence. By means of self-control a child is made 
happier, and is fitted for his duties, while a child 
and ever after, as otherwise he could not be. Many 



JOO HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

a man's life-course is saddened through his hopeless 
lack of that self-control to which he could easily 
have been helped in childhood, if only his parents 
had understood his needs and been faithful accord- 
ingly. 



1 



XL 

TRAINING A CHILD NOT TO TEASE. 



A child who never "teases" is a rarity; yet no 
child ought to tease. If a child does tease, the 
blame of his teasing properly rests on his parents, 
rather than on himself The parent who realizes 
this fact, will have an added stimulus to the work 
of training his child not to tease ; and no phase of 
the work of child-training is simpler, or surer of its 
result, than this one. 

"To tease" is "to pull," "to tug," "to drag," "to 
vex [or carry] with importunity," A child teases 
when he wants something /rom his parents, and 
fails to get it at the first asking. He pulls and 
tugs at his parents, in the hope of dragging them 
to his way of thinking, or to a consent to his hav- 
ing what he wants in spite of their different think- 
ing. He hope? to vex or carry them into the line 



lOl 



102 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

of his desires by means of his importunities, what- 
ever their view of the case may have been, to begin 
with. If a child could have what he wanted at his 
first asking, he would not tease; for there would be 
no room for his teasing. If a child never secured 
anything through teasing, he would not come into 
the habit of teasing ; for there would be no induce- 
ment to him to tease. When, therefore, a child is 
accustomed to tease, it is evident that he has been 
trained by his parents to tease, instead of being 
trained by them not to tease; and they are to bear 
the responsibility and blame of his teasing. 

Many a child does not expect to get what he 
wants, if it is out of the ordinary line of his daily 
needs, unless he teases for it; therefore he counts 
teasing a part of his regular duty in life, as truly as 
"beating down" the city shop-keeper on his prices 
is supposed to be the duty of a shopper from the 
country. If a child asks for a slice of bread-and- 
butter, or a bit of meat, at the family table, or for 
a glass of water between meals, he expects to get 
it at the first asking. Teasing for that is not in his 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 103 

mind as a necessity. But if he wants to stay at 
home from school without any reason for it, or to 
start off witli some of his schoolmates on a long 
and hazardous tramp on a Saturday, or to sit up an 
hour later than usual at night, or to have a new 
sled or velocipede or bicycle, or to go to the circus 
or to hear the minstrels, "like all the other fel- 
lows," — he is not so sure of gaining his request 
at the first asking. So, when the answer "No" 
comes back to him, in such a case, he meets it 
with the appeal, " Do let me. Oh, do ! " and then 
he enters upon a nerve struggle for the mastery 
over his parents at this point, with the idea in his 
mind that it is a single question of who shall 
be most persistent in adhering to his side of 
the conflict. 

There are few children who always succeed in 
carrying their point by teasing; but there are 
fewer who never succeed by this means. Most 
parents give way, sooner or later, in some of 
these conflicts with their children. It miay be 
that they are less determined than their children, 



I04 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

• 

and that they are simply tired out by the teasing. 
It may be that they are moved by their children's 
earnestness in the matter, and that they yield be- 
cause of their tenderness toward the little pleaders. 
It may be that their first answer to the appeal is a 
thoughtless one, and that their fuller considering 
of the matter leads theni to see it to be right to 
reverse their impulsive decision. Whatever be the 
parents' reason for their course in such a case, if 
they give a negative answer to their children's first 
request, and an affirmative one in response to more 
or less teasing on the children's part, they train 
their children so far to believe that teasing is an 
important factor in a child's progress in life; and 
of course they are responsible for their children's 
continuance in the habit of teasing. 

It is a misfortune to a child to suppose that teas- 
ing is essential to his gaining a point that he ought 
to gain. A result of such a view in his mind is, 
that he l^oks not to his parents' wisdom and judg- 
ment, but to his own positiveness and persistency, 
as the guide of his action In any mooted case of 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 105 

personal conduct; not to principles which are dis- 
closed to him by one who is in authority, but to 
impulses which are wholly in his own bosom. 
Such a view is inimical to all wise methods of 
thinking and doing on a child's part. And it is 
even more of a misfortune to the parent than to 
the child, for a child to have the idea that the 
parent's decision is a result of the child's teasing, 
rather than of the parent's understanding of what 
is right and best in a given case. No parent can 
have the truest respect of a child, while the child 
knows that he can tease that parent into compli- 
ance with the child's request, contrary to the par- 
ent's real or supposed conviction. For the child's 
sake, therefore, and also for the parent's, every 
child ought to be trained not to tease, and not 
to expect any possible advantage from teasing. 

Susannah Wesley, the mother of John and 
Charles Wesley, was accustomed to say, of her 
children, that they all learned very early that they 
were not to have anything that they cried for, and 
that so they soon learned not to cry for a thing 



I06 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

that they wanted. Who will doubt that John 
and Charles Wesley were stronger men, for this 
training, than they could have been if they were 
trained to look upon crying as a means of securing 
what was best for them ? Who will doubt that 
Susannah Wesley was more of a woman, and more 
respected by her sons because of her unvarying 
firmness at this point, than would have been possi- 
ble if she had frequently yielded to the pressure 
of their piteous crying for that which it was against 
her judgment to give to them? Any parent who 
would apply this rule of Susannah Wesley to the 
matter of teasing, might be sure of a corresponding 
result in the children's estimate of the practical 
value of teasing. Any child who finds that he is 
never to have anything for which he teases, will 
quickly quit teasing. How simple this rule, for 
this department of child-training! 

Simple as it seems, however, to be uniformly 
positive in refusing to give to a child anything for 
which he teases, it is not an easy thing to adhere 
to this rule, unvaryingly, and to do it wisely. And 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. lO/ 

the trouble in the case is not with the child, but 
with the parent. In order to give promptly, to a 
child's request, an answer that can rightly be in- 
sisted upon against all entreaties, a parent must do 
his thinking before he gives that answer, rather 
than afterwards. Too often a parent denies a 
child's request at the start without considering 
the case in all its bearings; and then, when the 
child presses his suit, the parent sees reasons for 
granting it which had not been in his mind be- 
fore. The child perceives this state of things, and 
realizes that the question is to be settled by his 
teasing, rather than by his parent's independent 
judgment; and that, therefore, teasing is the only 
means of securing a correct decision in the premises. 
Training a child not to tease, is a duty incumbent 
upon every parent ; but, as a prerequisite to this 
training of the child, the parent must himself be 
trained. When a child asks a favor of a parent, 
the parent must not reply hastily, or thoughtlessly, 
or without a full understanding of the case in all 
its involvings. If necessary, he may question the 



I08 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, , 

child, in order to a better understanding of the 
case, or he may postpone his answer until he can 
learn more about it; but he must not be over 
quick to reply merely as a means of pushing away 
the request for the time being. He must consider 
carefully what his final answer ought to be, before 
he gives an answer that the child is to accept as 
final ; and when the parent gives that answer, it 
ought to be with such kindly firmness that the 
child will not think of pressing his suit by teasing. 
And thus it is that any well-trained parent can 
train his child well in this sphere. 



XII. 

TRAINING A CHILD S APPETITE. 



What a grown person likes to eat or drink 
depends largely on what that person was trained 
to eat or drink while a child. And a child can be 
trained to like almost any sort of food or drink, 
either good or bad. No small responsibility, there- 
fore, for both the health and the enjoyment of a 
child, devolves on him who has in hand the train- 
ing of a child's appetite. 

That a child inherits tastes in the matter of food 

and drink cannot be questioned ; but this fact does 

not forbid the training of a child's tastes away from 

its inborn tendencies ; it merely adds an element to 

be considered in the training process. A child 

born in the tropics soon learns to like the luscious 

fruits which are given to him freely; while a child 

born in the arctic regions learns with the same 

109 



I lO HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

rapidity to like the grosser diet of fish and oil 
which is his chief supply of food. In one region 
the people live mainly on roots and berries; in 
another, they devour raw flesh or drink fresh 
blood; in yet another, they eat dried locusts or 
grasshoppers ; in yet another, it is milk or honey 
which is their chief means of sustaining life. In 
every region the children are easily trained to enjoy 
the eating of that which they have to eat ; and if a 
child is taken at an early age from one region to 
another, he quickly adapts himself to his new con- 
ditions, and learns to like that which is given to 
him as his means of satisfying hunger. All of 
which goes to show that the natural appetite of a 
child does not demand one kind of food above 
another, to that extent which forbids the training 
of a child to enjoy that which he can have and 
which he ought to use. 

As a rule, very little attention is given to the 
training of a child's appetite. The child is supplied 
with that food which is easiest obtained, and which 
the child is readiest to take. If the parents give 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 1 1 

little thought to their children's welfare, they simply 
allow their children to share with them at the com- 
mon table, without considering whether or not the 
food is that which is best suited to the children's 
needs. If the parents are tender-hearted, and lov- 
ingly indulgent toward their children, they are 
quite likely to show favor by giving to them those 
things which please a child's palate, or which are 
favorites with the parents themselves. 

Finding that a child likes sugar, a parent is 
tempted to give a bit of sugar to a child who is not 
ready to take anything else at its meal-time; even 
though that bit of sugar may destroy the child's 
appetite for the hour, or disturb the child's stomach 
for all day. Again, seeing that the child is glad to 
try any article of food which his parent enjoys, the 
parent, perhaps, proffers from his own plate that 
which he deems a delicacy ; although it may be of 
all things the least suited to the child's state of 
health, or condition of being. And so it is that the 
child is trained in wrong ways of eating, at the very 
time when he most needs training in the right way. 



112 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

A child is quite likely to have his freaks and 
fancies of appetite, which a kind parent is tempted 
to indulge instead of checking. One child would 
eat only the softer part of bread, while rejecting its 
crust. One would eat meat without vegetables ; 
another would refuse one kind of meat, or of vege- 
tables, while eating all others freely; and so on. 
The more these peculiarities are indulged, the 
stronger becomes their hold on the child. The 
more they are checked and restrained, the weaker 
their power becomes. Yet most parents seem to 
count such peculiarities as beyond their control, 
and therefore to be accepted as inevitable ; instead 
of realizing their personal responsibility for the 
continuance or the removal of them. 

" Your boy ought to eat less meat and more 
farinaceous food," says a physician to a mother, 
whose boy is in the doctor's hands. " Let him 
have oatmeal and milk for breakfast ; and see to it 
that he eats meat only once a day, and sparingly at 
that." " Johnny is a great hand for meat," is the 
answer; "and he can't take oatmeal." And in that 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING, 1 1 3 

answer the mother shows that all the blame in the 
case rests on herself, and not on her Johnny. 
Johnny ought to have been trained to eat what is 
good for him, instead of indulging his personal 
whims in the eating line. 

When a mother says, " My boy won't eat pota- 
toes," or " He won't eat tomatoes," or " He will eat 
no meat but beef," she simply confesses to her cul- 
pable failure of duty in the training of her boy's 
appetite. If she were to say that she did not 
approve of one of those things, or of the other, 
and therefore she would not give it to him, that 
would be one thing; but when she says that he 
will not take it even though she thinks it best for 
him, that is quite another thing; and there is 
where the blame comes in. 

Of course, it is to be understood that there are 
articles of food in familiar use which, here and 
there, a child cannot eat with safety. On the sea- 
shore, for example, the clam, which is eaten freely 
by most persons, seems to be as poison to certain 
individuals. It is not that these persons do not 



114 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

like the clam; but it is that their systems recoil 
from it, and that its eating is* sure to bring on a 
serious illness. A like state of things exists with 
regard to fresh strawberries in the country. They 
are a delicious fruit in the estimation of most per- 
sons. They are as a mild form of poison to certain 
individuals. But these cases are abnormal ones. 
They have no practical bearing on the prevailing 
rule, that a child can be trained to like whatever he 
ought to eat, and to refrain from the eating of 
whatever is not best for him. And herein is the 
principle of wise training in the realm of a child's 
appetite. 

A prominent American educator put this princi- 
ple into practice in his own family, consisting of 
four boys and four girls. He was a man of limited 
means, and he felt the necessity of training his 
children to eat such food as he deemed proper for 
them, and as good as he could afford to supply. 
His choice of food for his family table was wisely 
made, to begin with ; and then he showed wisdom 
in his mode of pressing it upon his children. 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 1 5 

If those children deemed a dish distasteful, they 
were privileged to wait until they were willing to 
eat it. There was no undue pressure brought to 
bear on them. They could simply eat it, or let it 
alone. If they went without it that meal, the same 
dish, or a similar one, was before them for the next 
meal ; and so on until hunger gave them the zest 
to eat it with unfeigned heartiness. By this means 
those children learned to eat what they ought to 
eat; and when they had come to years of maturity 
they realized the value of this training, which had 
made them the rulers of their appetite, instead of 
being its slaves. It needs no single example to 
illustrate the opposite course from this one. On 
every side we see persons who are subject to the 
whims and caprices of their appetite, because their 
appetite was never trained to be subject to them. 
And in one or another of these two directions the 
upbringing of every child is tending to-day. 

Peculiarly in the use of candy and of condiments 
is a child's appetite likely to be untrained, or trained 
amiss. Neither the one nor the other of these 



1 1 6 HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 

articles is suited to a child's needs ; but both of 
them are allowed to a child, regardless of what is 
best for him. The candy is given because the 
child fancies it. The condiments are given because 
the parents fancy them. Neither of the two is sup- 
posed to be beneficial to the child, but each is given 
in its turn because of the child's wish for it, and 
of the parent's weakness. There are parents whq 
train their children not to eat candy between meals, 
nor to use condiments at meals. These parents 
are wiser than the average ; and their children are 
both healthier and happier. There ought to be 
more of such parents, and more of such children. 
The difficulty in the way is always with the parents, 
instead of with the children. 

It is affirmed as a fact, that some Shetland ponies 
which were brought to America had been accus- 
tomed to eat fish, and that for a time they refused 
to eat hay, but finally were trained to its eating 
until they seemed to enjoy it as heartily as other 
ponies. Children to whom cod-liver oil was most 
distasteful when it was first given to them as a 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 11/ 

medicine, have been trained to like cod-liver oil as 
well as they liked syrup. And so it has been in 
the use of acid drinks, or of bitter coffee, by young 
children under the direction of a physician. By 
firm and persistent training the children have been 
brought to like that from which for a time they 
recoiled. It is for the parents to decide, with the 
help of good medical counsel, what their children 
ought to like, and then to train them to like it. 

It is by no means an easy matter for a parent to 
train a child's appetite ; but it is a very important 
matter, nevertheless. Nothing that is worth doing 
in this world is an easy matter ; and whatever is 
really worth doing is worth all that its doing costs 
— and more. In spite of all its difficulties, the 
training of any child's appetite can be compassed, 
by God's blessing. And compassed it ought to be, 
whatever are its difficulties. It is for the parent to 
decide what the child shall eat, as it is for the 
parent to decide what that child shall wear. The 
parent who holds himself responsible for what a 
child shall put on, but who shirks his responsibility 



Il8 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

for what that child shall take in, would seem to 
have more regard for the child's appearance than 
for his upbuilding from within ; and that could 
hardly be counted a sign of parental wisdom or of 
parental love. 



XIII. 

TRAINING A CHILD AS A 
QUESTIONER. ' 



A child is a born questioner. He does not have 
to be trained to be a questioner; but he does need 
to be trained as a questioner. A child has been 
not inaptly called "an animated interrogation- 
point." Before a child can speak his questions, 
he looks them; and when he can speak them out, 
his questions crowd one another for expression, 
until it would seem that, if a parent were to answer 
all of his child's questions, that parent would liave 
time to do nothing else. The temptation to a 
parent, in view of this state of things, is to repress 
a child as a questioner, rather than to train him 
as a questioner; and just here is where a parent 
may lose or undervalue a golden privilege as a 

parent. 

119 



J20 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

The beginning of all knowledge is a question. 
All progress in knowledge is a result of continued 
questioning. Whence? What? Why? Where- 
fore ? Whither ? These are the starting-points of 
investigation and research to young and to old 
alike; and when any one of these questions has 
been answered in one sphere, it presents itself anew 
in another. Unless a child were a questioner at 
the beginning of his life, he could make no start 
in knowledge; and if a child were ever caused to 
stay his questionings, there would be at once an 
end to his progress in knowledge. Questioning is 
the expression of mental appetite. He who lacks 
the desire to question, is in danger of death from 
intellectual starvation. 

Yet with all the importance that, on the face of 
it, attaches to a child's impulse to ask questions, it 
is unmistakably true that far more pains are taken 
by parents generally to check children in their 
questionings, than to train them in their question- 
ing. "Don't be asking so many questions;" 
"Why will you be asking questions all the time?" 



HINTS ON CHILD- TRA IN INC. 1 2 1 

"You'll worry my life out with your questions." 
These are the parental comments on a child's 
questions, rather than, "I'm glad to have you 
want to know about all these things;" or, 
"Never hesitate to ask me a question about any- 
thing that you want to know more of; " or, " The 
more questions you ask, the better, if only they 
are proper questions." 

Sooner or later the average child comes to feel 
that, the fewer questions he asks, the more of a 
man he will be ; and so he represses his impulse to 
inquire into the nature and purpose and meaning 
of that which newly interests him ; until, perhaps, 
he is no longer curious concerning that which he 
does not understand, or is hopeless of any satisfac- 
tion being given to him concerning the many prob- 
lems which perplex his wondering mind. By the 
time he has reached young manhood, he who was 
full of questions in order that he might have knowl- 
edge, seems to be willing to live and die in igno- 
rance, rather than to make a spectacle of himself by 
multiplying questions that may be an annoyance 



122 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

to others, or that may be deemed a source of dis- 
credit to himself. 

There are obvious reasons why the average 
parent is not incHned to encourage his child to 
ask all the questions he thinks of In the first 
place, it takes a great deal of time to answer a 
child's questions. It takes time to feed a child, and 
to wash it and dress it ; but it takes still more time 
to supply food and clothing for a child's mind. 
And when a parent finds that the answering of 
fifty questions in succession from a child only 
seems to prompt the child to ask five hundred 
questions more, it is hardly to be wondered at that 
the parent thinks there ought to be a stop put 
to this sort of thing somewhere. Then, again, a 
child's questions are not always easy to be answered 
by the child's parent. The average child can ask 
questions that the average parent cannot answer; 
and it is not pleasant for a parent to be compelled 
to confess ignorance on a subject in which his child 
has a living interest. It is so much easier, and so 
much more imposing, for a parent to talk to a child 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 23 

on a subject which the parent does understand, and 
which the child does not, than it is for the parent 
to be questioned by the child on a subject which 
neither child nor parent understands, that the 
parent's temptation is a strong one to discounte.- 
nance a habit that has this dangerous tendency. 

That there ought to be limitations to a child's 
privilege of question-asking is evident; for every 
privilege, like every duty, has its limitations. But 
the limitations of this privilege ought to be as 
to the time when questions may be asked, and as 
to the persons of whom they may be asked, rather 
than as to the extent of the questioning. A child 
ought not to be free to ask his mother's guest how 
old she is, or why she does not look as pleasant as 
his mother ; nor yet to ask one of his poorer play- 
mates why he has no better shoes, or how it is that 
his mother has to do her own washing. A child 
must not interrupt others in order to ask a question 
that fills his mind, nor is it always right for him 
to ask a question of his father or mother before 
others. When to ask, and of whom to ask, the 



124 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

questions that it is proper for him to ask, must be 
made known to a child in connection with his 
training by his parents as a questioner. 

It is to the parent that a child ought to be privi- 
leged to come in unrestrained freeness as a ques- 
tioner. Both the mother and the father should 
welcome from a child any question that the child 
honestly desires an answer to. And every parent 
ought to set apart times for a child's free question- 
insr, when the child can feel that the hour is as 
sacred to that purpose as the hour of morning and 
evening devotion is sacred to prayer. It may be 
just before breakfast, or just after, or at the close 
of the day, that the father is to be always ready to 
answer his child's special questions. It may be 
when father and child walk out together, or dur- 
ing the quieter hours of Sunday, that the child is 
sure of his time for questioning his father. The 
mother's surest time for helping her child as a 
questioner, is at the child's bed-time ; although 
her child may be free to sit by her side when she 
is sewing, or to stand near her when she is busy 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA IN INC. 1 2 5 

about other household matters, and to question 
her while she is thus working. Whenever the 
child's hour for questioning his parent has come, 
the child ought to be encouraged to ask any and 
every question that he really wants to ask; and 
the parent ought to feel bound to give to the 
child's eveiy question a loving and well-considered 
answer. 

A child needs parental help in his training as a 
questioner. While he is to be free to ask ques- 
tions, he is to exercise his freedom within the 
limits of reason and of a right purpose. A 
child may be inclined to multiply silly questions, 
thoughtless questions, aimless questions. In such 
a case, he needs to be reminded of his duty of 
seeking knowledge and of trying to gain it, and 
that neither his time nor his parent's time ought 
to be wasted in attending to questions that have 
no point to them. Again, a child may be inclined 
to dwell unduly on a single point in his question- 
ing. Then it is his parent's duty to turn him away 
from that point by inducing him to question on 



126 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

another point. Whenever a child is questioning 
his parent, that parent has the responsibihty and 
the power of training the child as a questioner, 
by receiving in kindness and by shaping with 
discretion the child's commendable impulse and 
purpose of questioning. 

When a child asks a question that a parent really 
cannot answer, it is a great deal better for the parent 
to say frankly, "I do not know," than to say im- 
patiently, '' Oh ! don't be asking such foolish ques- 
tions." But, on the other hand, it is often better to 
give a simple answer, an answer to one point in the 
child's question, than to attempt an answer that is 
beyond the child's comprehension, or than to say 
that it is impossible to explain that subject to a 
child just now. For example, if a child asks why 
it is that the sunrise is always to be seen from the 
windows on one side of the house, and the sunset 
from the windows on the other side, there is no 
need of telling him that he is too young to have 
that explained to him, nor yet of attempting an ex- 
planation of the astronomical facts involved. The 



• HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. - 12/ 

better way is to answer him that the one window 
looks toward the east and the other toward the 
west; and that the sun rises in the east and sets 
in the west. This will give the child one new item 
of knowledge; and that is all that he cares for 
just then. 

A child may ask a question on a point that can- 
not with propriety be made clear to him just yet. 
In such a case he ought not to be rebuked for 
seeking light, but an answer of some kind is to be 
given to him, in declaration of a general truth that 
includes the specific subject of his inquiry ; and 
then he is to be kindly told that by and by he can 
know more about this than he can now. This 
will satisfy a well-disposed child for the time being, 
while it will encourage him to continue in the atti- 
tude of a truth-seeking questioner. 

A very simple answer to his every question is 
all that a child looks for; but that is his right, 
if he is honestly seeking information, and it is his 
parent's duty to give it to him, if he comes for it 
at a proper time and in a proper spirit. A child 



128 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

is harmed if he be unduly checked as a ques- 
tioner; and he is helped as he could be in no 
other way, as a truth-seeker, if he be encouraged 
and wisely trained by his parents in a child's high 
prerogative as a questioner. 



XIV. 

TRAINING A CHILUS FAITH. 



There is no need of trying to implant faith in a 
child's nature, for it is there to begin with. But 
there is need of training a child's faith, so that it 
shall be rightly directed and wisely developed. 
Every child has the instinct of faith, as surely 
as it has the instinct of appetite. The inborn 
impulse to seek nourishment is not more real and 
positive in a normal child, than is the impulse 
in such a child to cling to and to trust another. 
Both instincts are already there, and both need 
training. 

The faith here spoken of is that faith that rests 

on a person, not that miscalled " faith " which 

applies to an assent to a series of dogmas. True 

faith, indeed, always rests on a person. Any other 

use of the term is only by accommodation, and is 

9 129 



I30 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

liable to be misleading. One of the best definitions 
of Christian faith is, " That act by which one per- 
son, a sinner, commits himself to another person, a 
Saviour." Even before a child is old enough to 
learn of a Saviour, the instinct of faith is one of the 
child's qualities; just as the instinct of hunger is a 
child's quality before the child is old enough to 
know the nature of its fitting food. If a mother, 
or a nurse, or even a stranger, puts a finger into 
the chubby hand of an infant, that little hand will 
close over the proffered finger, and cling to it as 
for dear life. And it is not until a child has learned 
to distrust, that it is said to be " old enough to be 
afraid." While a child's faith is yet undisturbed, 
as also after a child's faith has become discriminat- 
ing, a child's faith needs wise directing and devel- 
oping ; and to this end there is need of wisdom and 
of care on the part of those who have the respon- 
sibility of this training. 

While the instinct of faith is innate in the child, 
a knowledge of the One on whom his faith can rest 
with ultimate confidence is not innate. A knowl- 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 1 3 1 

edge of God comes to man by revelation ; and 
whoever has responsibility for a child's moral train- 
ing, has the duty of revealing to that child a 
knowledge of God. But a child can understand 
God, and can grasp a true conception of him, quite 
as easily as the profoundest philosopher can. A 
child does not need to be led by degrees into a 
knowledge of God. As soon as he is capable of 
learning that his voice can be heard by his loving 
mother or his loving father in another room, he is 
capable of learning that his voice can be heard by 
a loving Father whom he has never seen ; who is 
always within hearing, but never within sight ; who 
is the loving Father of his father and mother, as 
well as of himself and of everybody else ; who is 
able to do all things, and who is sure to do all 
things well. In the knowledge of this truth, a 
child can be taught to pray to God in faith, as 
early as he can speak; and even to know some- 
thing of the meaning of prayer before he can utter 
words intelligently. 

From the very beginning the child can take in 



1 3 2 HINTS ON CHILD- TRA INING. 

the great truths concerning God's nature, and the 
scope of God's power, as fully as a theologian 
can take them in. Therefore there need be no 
fear that too much is proffered to the child's mind 
in this sphere, if only it all be proffered in sim- 
plicity as explicit truth, without any attempt at its 
explanation. 

Bishop Patteson, in his missionary work among 
the South Sea Islanders, found it best to begin with 
John's Gospel, in imparting religious instruction to 
untutored natives ; for they could take that in easier 
than they could comprehend the historical books 
of the Bible. It is much the same with children. 
They can receive the profoundest truths of the 
Bible without any explanation. When they are 
older, they will be better fitted to grapple with 
the difficulties of elementary religious teachings. 
The idea that a child must have a knowledge of 
the outline of the Bible story before he knows 
the central truth that Jesus Christ is his loving 
Saviour, is as unreasonable as it would be to sup- 
pose that a child must know the anatomy of the 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 33 

human frame before he is able to believe in his 
mother's love for him. 

The first lesson in the training of a child's faith 
is the lesson that he is to have faith in God. Many 
a child is told to have faith in the power of 
prayer, or faith in the value of good conduct, with- 
out being shown that his faith should rest wholly 
and absolutely on God. He is told that he can 
hope to have whatever he prays for; and that if 
he is a good boy he can expect a blessing, while if 
he is a bad boy he cannot expect to be blessed. 
With this training the child's faith is drawn away 
from God, and is led to rest on his personal con- 
duct ; whereas his faith ought to be trained to rest 
on the God to whom he prays, and in loving obedi- 
ence to whom he strives to be good. 

If you tell a child that God is able and ready to 
give him everything that he prays for, the child is 
prompt to accept your statement as a truth, and so 
he prays for a pleasant day, when a pleasant day is 
desired by him. If the pleasant day comes accord- 
ingly, the child's faith in prayer is confirmed ; but 



134 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

if the day be a stormy one, the child's mind is be- 
wildered, and a doubt is likely to creep into his 
mind whether prayer is always so effective as he 
had been told to believe it to be. And the case 
is similar when the child prays for the health 
of one whom he loves, or for some gift which he^ 
longs to receive, or for success in some personal 
endeavor, and the issue is not in accordance with 
his petition. 

If, however, on the other hand, you plainly tell a 
child that God knows what is best for us better than 
we know for ourselves, and that, while God is glad 
to have us come to him with all our wishes and all 
our troubles, we must leave it to God to decide just 
what he will give to us and do for us, the child is 
ready to accept this statement as the truth; and 
then his faith in God is not disturbed in the slight- 
est degree by finding that God has decided to do 
differently from his request to God in prayer. On 
every side, children are being taught to have faith 
in prayer, rather than to have faith in God ; and, in 
consequence their faith is continually subject to 



HIXTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. I35 

shocks which would never have disturbed it if it 
had been trained to rest on God instead of resting- 
on prayer. 

If you tell a child that God loves good children, 
and that he does not love bad children, the child 
will believe you ; and then, when he thinks he is a 
good child, he will be glad that there is a God who 
can appreciate him ; but when he knows he is a 
bad child, he will perhaps be sorry that there is a 
God in the universe to be his enemy. So far as 
your training does its legitimate work, in this in- 
stance, the child is trained, not to have faith in 
God, but to have confidence in his own merits as a 
means of commending him to the God whom you 
have misrepresented to him. If, on the other 
hand, you tell a child that God is love, and that his 
love goes out unfailingly toward all, even toward 
those who have no love for him, and that, 
while God loves to have children good, he loves 
them tenderly while they are very bad, the 
child will take in that great truth gratefully; and 
then he is readier to have faith in God, and to want 



136 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

to be good because the loving God loves to have 
him good. And in this way a child's faith in God 
may be the means of quickening and shaping his 
desires in the direction of well-doing. 

As a means of training a child's faith in God 
more intelligently and with greater definiteness, the 
fact of the Incarnation may be disclosed to him in 
all the fulness of its richest meaning. A very 
young child can comprehend the truth that God in 
his love sent his Son into this world as a little child, 
with the name Jesus — or Saviour; that Jesus grew 
up from childhood into manhood, that he loved little 
children, that he died for them, that he rose again 
from the dead, and ascended into heaven, that still he 
loves children, that he w^atches over them tenderly, 
and that he is ready to help them in all their trials 
and needs, and to be their Saviour forever. With 
this knowledge of Jesus as God's representative, a 
child can be trained to trust Jesus at all times ; to 
feel safe in darkness and in danger because of his 
nearness, his love, and his power ; to be sure of his 
sympathy, and to rest on him as a sufficient Sav- 



HINTS ON CHILD- TRA INING. 1 3 7 

iour. That a child Is capable of such faith as this, 
is not fairly a question. The only question, if 
question there be, is whether any one but a child 
can attain to such faith. One thing is as sure as 
the words of Jesus are true, and that is, that "who- 
soever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a 
little child shall in no wise enter therein;" or. In 
other words, that a little child's faith is a pattern 
for the believers of every age. 

The training of a child's faith is the most delicate 
and the most important duty that devolves upon 
one who is set- to the work of child-training. More 
is involved in it for the child's welfare, and more 
depends upon it for the child's enjoyment and effi- 
ciency in life, than pivots on any other phase of the 
training of a child. He who would train a child's 
faith aright has need of wisdom, and yet more has 
need of faith, — just such faith as that to the exer- 
cise of which he would train the child of his 
charge. Peculiarly has a parent need to watch lest 
he check or hinder unduly the loving promptings 
of a child's faith ; for it is our Lord himself who has 



138 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

said: "Whoso shall cause one of these Httle ones 
which beheve on me to stumble, it is profitable for 
him that a great millstone should be hanged about 
his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth 
of the sea." 



XV. 

TRAINING CHILDREN TO SABBATH 
OBSERVANCE. 



Every day in the week is the Lord's day, lor 
children; but one day in the week is pecuHarly 
the Lord's day, for children as well as for older 
persons. How to train a child to wise and faithful 
Sabbath observance, on the Lord's day, is a ques- 
tion that puzzles many a Christian parent ; and, 
as a rule, the more true and loving and Christ-like 
the parent, the greater the practical puzzle at this 
point. The difficulty in the case is not so much, 
how to secure the observance of the Sabbath by a 
child, as it is to decide what should be the proper 
observance of the Sabbath by a child. 

If, indeed, it were simply a question of com- 
pelling a child to conform to certain fixed and 
rigid rules of Sabbath observance, any able-bodied 

139 



HO HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

and determined parent, with a stern face, and the 
help of a birch rod and a dark closet, could com- 
pass ail the difficulties of the case. But while it is 
a question of bringing the child to enjoy the loving 
service of God on God's peculiar day, it requires 
other qualities than sternness on the parent's part, 
and other agencies than a birch rod and a dark 
closet, to meet the requirements of the situation. 
And so it is that a right apprehension of the nature 
of a wise and proper observance of the Sabbath is 
an essential prerequisite of the wise and proper 
training of children to such an observance. 

Love must be at the basis of all acceptable ser- 
vice of God. Any observance of the commands 
of God which is slavish and reluctant, is sure to 
lack God's approval. The Sabbath is a sign, or a 
token, of the loving covenant between God and 
his people. It is to be borne in mind, it is to be 
remembered, it is to be counted holy, accordingly. 
One day in seven is to be given up to loving 
thoughts of God, to a loving rest from one's own 
work and pleasure, and to a loving part in the 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 141 

worship of God. On that day, above other days, 
the thought of God's children should be : 

"This is the day which the Lord hath made; 
We will rejoice and be glad in it." 

How to train children to a joyous observance of 
the Lord's day, to a joyous looking forward to its 
coming, and to a joyous looking back upon its 
memories, is a weightier question, with thoughtful 
and intelligent Christian parents, than how to con- 
form the conduct of children to the traditional 
ideas of leg-itimate Sabbath observance. An utter 
disregard of the Sabbath in the training of chil- 
dren is a great wrong; but even a greater wrong 
than this is the training of children to count the 
Lord's day a day of irksome constraint instead of 
a delight. 

As a child's occupation on other days of the 
week is different from the occupation of his 
parents, so a child's occupation on the Lord's day 
ought to be different from his parents' occupation 
on that day. It would be cruel, indeed, to insist 



142 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

that on the Lord's day alone a child should be 
forced to do the same things that his parents do, 
and that so that day above all others should be a 
day of toil and of discomfort to a child. For 
parent and for child alike, the Lord's day should 
be a day of rest and of worship ; but neither for 
parent nor for child is simple inaction rest; nor is 
hard Bible-study, or merely sitting still in church- 
time, worship. Rest is to be secured by a change 
of occupation, and worship is to be performed by 
turning the thoughts God-ward. How to help chil- 
dren to refreshing rest and to joyous worship on 
the Lord's day, is the practical matter at issue. 

To bring a child into habits of loving and rev- 
erent Sabbath observance is a matter of training; 
and that training ought to begin at a very early 
age of the child, and continue throughout the 
years of his childhood. Long before a child can 
know what is the distinctive idea of the Sabbath, 
or why it is to be observed in a manner peculiar 
to itself, he can be trained to perceive that one day 
in seven is different from the other six days, and 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 1 43 

that its standard is higher and its spirit more joy- 
ous; that its tone is quieter, and its atmosphere 
more reverent. And all this ought to be secured 
to every child in a Christian home, from the very 
outset of the child's training to its close. Even a 
dog, or a horse, or an ox, learns to know and to 
prize some of the privileges and enjoyments of the 
Sabbath; and an infant in arms is as capable as 
one of the brutes of receiving an impression of 
truth in this realm of fact and sentiment. But 
in the case of the infant or of the brute every- 
thing depends upon those persons who have it 
in training. 

A common cause of trouble in this matter is, 
that the training does not begin early enough. A 
child is permitted to go on for months, if not for 
years, without any direct suggestion of a difference 
between the Lord's day and other days of the 
week; and when the first attempt is made to show 
him that such a difference ought to be recognized, 
he is already fixed in habits which stand in the 
way of this recognition, so that the new call on 



144 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

him breaks in unpleasantly upon his course of 
favorite infantile action. Yet it ought to be so 
that a child's earliest consciousness of life is linked 
with the evidences of the greater light and joy 
and peace of the day that is above other days of 
the week, in his nursery experiences, and that his 
earliest habits are in the line of such a distinction 
as this. And thus it can be. 

It is for the parents to make clear the distinction 
that marks, in the child's mind, the Lord's day as 
the day of days in the week's history. The child 
may be differently dressed, or differently washed, 
or differently handled, on that day from any other. 
Some more disagreeable detail of his morning 
toilet, or of his day's management, might on that 
day be omitted, as a means of marking the day. 
There may be a sweeter song sung in his hearing, 
or a brighter exhibit of some kind made in his 
sight, or a peculiar favor of some sort granted to 
him, which links a special joy with that day in 
comparison with the days on either side of it. As 
soon as the child is old enough to grasp a rattle or 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 145 

to play with a toy, there ought to be a difference 
between his Sabbath rattle or other toy, and his 
week-day delights in the same line. By one means 
or another he should have the Lord's day to look 
back upon as his brightest memory, and to look 
forward to as his fondest anticipation. And in this 
way he can be trained to enjoy the Lord's day, 
even before he can know why it is made a joy to 
him. A child is well started in the line of wise 
training when he is carried along as far as this. 

When the anniversary of a child's birthday comes 
around, a loving parent is likely to emphasize and 
illustrate to the child the parental love which should 
make that season a season of gladness and joy to 
the child. Special gifts or special favors are be- 
stowed on the child at such a time, so that the 
child shall be sure to welcome each successive re- 
turn of his birthday anniversary. So, again, when 
the Christmas anniversary has come, the Christian 
parent sees to it that the child has a cause of de- 
light in the enjoyments and possessions it brings. 
It is not that the parents are lacking in love at 



146 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

other times ; but it is that the child shall have fresh 
reminders, at these anniversary seasons, of that love 
which is unfailing throughout the year. So it 
ought to be, in the effort to make clear and promi- 
nent, on the return of each Lord's day, the love of 
God which is the same at one time as at another. 
As the parents will treasure little gifts as loving 
surprises for their children on the birthday and the 
Christmas anniversary, so the parents ought to plan 
to make each new Lord's day a better, brighter day 
than any other of the week; and to this end the 
best things for the child's enjoyment may well be 
kept back until then, as a help to this uplifting of 
the delights of the day above the week-days' 
highest level. 

It is customary to keep a child's best clothing 
for use on the Lord's day. It might well, also, be 
customary to keep a child's best toys, best pictures, 
best books, best enjoyments, for a place in the same 
day of days in the week's round. This is a custom 
in many a well-ordered Christian home, and the 
advantages of it are apparent there. 



HINTS. ON CHILD-TRAINING. 147 

The Sabbath closet, or Sabbath cabinet, or Sab- 
bath drawer, ought to be a treasure-house of de- 
Hghts in every Christian home ; not to be opened 
except on the Lord's day, and sure to bring added 
enjoyment when it is opened in the children's 
sight In that treasure-house there may be bright 
colored pictures of Bible scenes; Sunday-school 
papers; books of stories which are suitable and 
attractive above others for Sabbath reading; dis- 
sected maps of Bible lands, or dissected pages of 
Bible texts, of the Lord's Prayer, or of the Apostles' 
Creed ; models of the Tabernacle, or of Noah's 
Ark and its inmates. Whatever is there, ought 
resolutely to be kept there at all other times than 
on the Lord's day. However much the children 
may long for the contents of that treasure-house, 
between Sabbaths, they ought to find it impossible 
to have a view of them until that day of days has 
come round again. The use of these things should 
be associated inseparably, in the children's minds, 
with the Lord's day and its privileges, and so 
should help to make that day a delight, as a day 



1 48 HINTS ON CHILD- TRA INING. 

of God's choicest gifts to those whom God loves 
and who love him. By such means the very plays 
or recreations of the children may be made as 
truly a means of rest and of worship on the chil- 
dren's part as are the labors of the parents, in the 
line of Bible study or of Sunday-school teaching, 
a means of Sabbath rest and of Sabbath worship 
to them on each recurring Lord's day. 

Even for the youngest children there may be a 
touch of Sabbath enjoyment in a piece of Sabbath 
confectionery, or of Sabbath cake, of a sort allowed 
them at no other time. There are little ones who 
are not permitted to have candy freely at their own 
homes, but who are privileged to have a choice bit 
of this at their grandmother's, where they visit, 
after Sunday-school, on every Lord's day. And 
there are grown-up children who remember pleas- 
antly that when they were very little ones they 
were permitted to have a make-believe Sabbath 
visit together in their happy home, with a table 
spread with tiny dishes of an attractive appearance, 
which they never saw except on the Lord's day. 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 49 

There are others who remember with what deUght 
they were accustomed, while children, after a certain 
age, to sit up and have a place at the family table 
at tea-time, on Sundays ; although on other days 
they must be in bed before that hour. 

If, indeed, the Lord's day is, in any such way, 
made a day of peculiar delight to children, with 
the understanding on their part — as they come to 
years of understanding — that this is because the 
day is peculiarly the Lord's day, there is a gain to 
them, so far, in the Lord's plan of the Sabbath for 
man's welfare in the loving service of the loving 
God. But if, on the other hand, the first impres- 
sions in the children's mind concerning this day of 
days are, that it is a day of harsh prohibitions and 
of dreariness and discomfort, there is so far a dis- 
honoring in their minds of the day and of Him 
whose day it is; and for this result their unwise 
parents are, of course, responsible. 

As children grow older, and are capable of com- 
prehending more fully the spiritual meanings and 
privileges and possibilities of the Sabbath, they 



I 5 O HINTS ON' CHILD - TRAINING. 

need more help from their parents, — not less help, 
but more, — in order to their wise use of the day, 
and to the gaining of its greatest advantages. The 
hour of family worship ought to have more in it 
on the Lord's day than on any other day of the 
week. Its exercises should be ampler and more 
varied. Either at that hour, or at some other, the 
Sunday-school lesson for the week should be taken 
up and studied by parents and children together. 

There are homes where the children have a Sun- 
day-school of their own, at a convenient hour of 
the day, in the family room, led by father or mother, 
or by older brother or sister, with the help of maps 
and blackboard, or slates. There are other homes 
in which the father leads a children's service of 
worship, in the early evening, and reads a little 
sermon from some one of the many published 
volumes of sermons for children. Wherever either 
of these plans is adopted, there should be a part 
for each, of the children, not only in the sing- 
ing and reading, but in asking and answering 
questions. 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 1 5 I 

Apart from such formal exercises as these, one 
child can be showing and explaining a book of 
Bible pictures or of Scripture cards to younger 
children; or one group of children can be pick- 
ing out Bible places or Bible persons from their 
recent lessons and arranging them alphabetically 
on slates or on slips of paper, while another group 
is studying out some of the many Bible puzzles 
or curious Bible questions which are published so 
freely for such a purpose. Variety in methods 
is desirable from week to week, and variety is 
practicable. 

The singing of fitting and attractive songs of joy 
and praise wall naturally have larger prominence, 
at the hours of family worship, and at other hours 
of the day and evening, on the Lord's day, than 
on other days of the week. And parents ought 
to find time - on the Lord's day to read aloud to 
their children, or to tell them, stories suited to 
their needs, as well as to lead in familiar conversa- 
tion with them. For this mode of training there 
can be no satisfactory substitute. Of course, it 



152 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

takes time, and it calls for courage, for high 
resolve, or self-denial, and for faith. But it is 
worth more than all it costs. 

All this is apart from the question of the attend- 
ance and duties of the little ones at the Sunday- 
school or at the place of public worship. When a 
child is of suitable age to have an intelligent part 
in the exercises of the Sunday-school, he should 
be helped to find those exercises a means of sacred 
enjoyment. When, at a later day, he is old enough 
to be at the general service of worship without 
undue weariness, it is the duty of the parents to 
make that place a place of gladsomeness to him, 
as often as he is found there. Not wearisome- 
ness, but rest, is appropriate to the holiest Sab- 
bath services of the Lord's day. Not deepened 
shadow, but clearer sunlight, is fitting to its 
sacred hours. 

The spirit of the entire day's observances ought 
to be a reverent spirit; but it should be under- 
stood by the parents that true reverence is better 
shown in gladness than in gloom. Where the 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 1 5 3 

Lord's day is counted a dismal one by the chil- 
dren, it is obvious that the parents have failed to 
train their children to hallow that day, as the day 
which is peculiarly sacred to the love of their lov- 
ing Father in heaven. Whether at home, or at 
Sunday-school or any other church service, the 
children should be helped to realize that the day 
is a day of brightness and of cheer; that while 
differing in its occupations and enjoyments from 
all other days, it is the best of them all. When a 
little boy, out of a home thus ordered, heard one 
of his companions express, on Sunday, a wish that 
it was already Monday, the little fellow said, with 
evident heartiness, "Why! don't you like Sun- 
day ? I like it best of all the days." And so it 
ought to be in the case of every boy and girl in a 
Christian home. 

The difference is not in the children, but in the 
mode of their training, when in one home the 
Sabbath is welcomed and in another home it is 
dreaded by the little ones. Such a difference 
ought not to exist. By one means or another, or 



1 54 HINTS ON CHILD - TRAINING. 

by one means and another, all children ought to 
be trained to find the Lord's day a day of delight 
in the Lord's service; and parents ought to see to 
it that their children, if not others, are thus trained. 
It can be so; it should be so. 



\ 



XVI. 
TRAINING A CHILD IN AMUSEMENTS., 



Amusements properly belong to children. A 
child needs to be amused while he is a child, and 
because he is a child. It may be a question 
whether a grown-up person, of average intelligence 
and of tolerable moral worth, does really need 
amusements, however much he may need diversion 
or recreation within due limits ; but there can be no 
fair question as to the need of amusements for a 
child. And if a child has need of amusements, he 
has need to be trained in his choice and use of 
amusements. 

How to amuse a child wisely and w^ith effective- 
ness, is a practical question with a nurse or loving 
parent, from the time that the little babe first begins 
to look up with interest at a ball or a trinket swung 

before his eyes just out of reach of his uplifted 

155 



156 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

hands, or to look and listen as a toy rattle is shaken 
above him, — all the way along until he is old 
enough to choose his own methods of diversion 
and recreation. And on the answering of this 
question much depends for the child's character 
and happiness ; for amusements have their influence 
in shaping a child's estimates of life and its pur- 
poses, and in fitting or unfitting him for the duties 
he has to perform in life. 

There is a wide range in a child's amusements ; 
in their nature, in their tendency, and in the com- 
panionships which accompany them. The differ- 
ences between some of these which may seem but 
slight at the start, involve differences of principle 
as well as of method ; and they need to be looked 
at in view of their probable outcome, rather than 
as they present themselves just now to the surface 
observer. Indeed, it is the looking for the under- 
lying principle in the attractiveness of a given form 
of amusement, and for the obvious trend of its 
influence, that is the primary duty of a parent who 
would train his children wisely in their amusements, 



HINTS ON CHILD- TRA INING. 1 5 / 

from the earliest beginning of effort to amuse those 
children. 

The center of companionships in a child's amuse- 
ments ought to be the parents themselves. In the 
nature of things it is impossible for the parents to 
be a child's only companions in this line, or to be 
always his companions ; but parents ought, jn some 
way and at some time, to evidence such an interest 
in their every child's amusements that he will feel 
that he is as close to his parents, and that his 
parents are as much to him, in this thing as in any 
other. If, indeed, a child had no companionship 
with his parents in his amusements, there would be 
reared a sad barrier between him and his parents in 
that sphere of his life which is largest and most 
attractive while he is at an age to be most impressible. 

" One of the first duties of a genuinely Christian 
parent," says Bushnell, "is to show a generous 
sympathy with the plays of his children ; providing 
playthings and means of play, inviting suitable 
companions for them, and requiring them to have 
it as one of their pleasures, to keep such compan- 



158 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

ions entertained in their plays, instead of playing 
always for their own mere self-pleasing. Some- 
times, too, the parent having a hearty interest in 
the plays of his children, will drop out for the time 
the sense of his years, and go into the frolic of their 
mood with them. They will enjoy no other time 
so much as that, and it will have the effect to make 
the authority, so far unbent, just as much stronger 
and more welcome, as it has brought itself closer 
to them, and given them a more complete show of 
sympathy." 

A true mother will naturally incline to show a 
hearty interest in her child's amusements, and she 
ought to encourage herself to feel that the time 
taken for this exhibit of her loving sympathy with 
him is by no means lost time. It may be harder 
for the father, than for the mother, to give the time 
or to show the interest essential to this duty; but 
he ought to secure the benefit of it in some way. 
A few minutes given to the little ones, as they are 
privileged to clamber into the father's bed before 
he is up in the morning, and romp with them there, 



HINTS ON CHILD- TRA INING. 1 5 9 

will do much to connect him pleasantly with their 
play-time. So, again, will a brief season at the 
close of the day, when he becomes acquainted with 
their special amusements, and shows that they are 
much to him, because they are much to his dear ones. 
No companionship should be permitted to a child 
in his amusements that is likely to lower his moral 
tone, or to vitiate his moral taste. There are cases 
in which a parent is tempted to allow his children 
to be taken into a portion of the home establish- 
ment, or of the immediate neighborhood, in order 
that they may be amused by or with the children 
or the grown persons there, when he would be un- 
willing to have them under such influences or in 
such surroundings for any other purpose. This 
is a great mistake. The companionships of a child 
in the stable or at the street corner, while he is 
merely being amused, are likely to be quite as 
potent and pervasive as those which are around 
him in the parlor or the dining-room, at a time 
when his nature is not so actively and freely at its 
fullest play. In fa'ct, the companionships which 



l6o HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

accompany a child's amusements are an important 
feature in the training forces of this sphere. 

Amusements may be, and ought to be, such as 
will aid in developing and upbuilding a child's 
manliness or womanliness. Again, they may be 
such as will prove an injury to the tastes and char- 
acter of the child. Even the simplest forms of 
amusement may have in them the one or the other 
of these tendencies. A child's earlier playthings 
and games may have much to do with training 
his eye and ear and hand and voice and bodify 
movements. They ought all to be watched and 
shaped accordingly. This truth is the fundamental 
one in the kindergarten system; and a study of 
the methods of that system may be of service to 
a parent who would learn how to guide a child in 
his amusements in this direction. 

Peculiarly is it important that a child's amuse- 
ments should not have in them any element of 
chance^ as tending to give him the idea that his 
attainments or progress in life will depend in any 
measure upon " luck." From his play with build- 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. l6l 

ing-blocks or with jack-straws, up to his games of 
ball or of chess, every movement that a child is 
called on to make in the sphere of his amusements 
ought to be one in which his success or his failure 
is dependent on his skill or his lack of it. A child 
may be harmed for life by the conviction that his 
hope of success' in the w^orld rests on that " streak 
of luck " which seemed to be his in the games of 
chance he played in boyhood. And a child may 
be helped for life by the character which was de- 
veloped in him in his boyhood's games of skill. 
It was an illustration of this principle, when the 
Duke of Wellington pointed to the playground of 
Eton, and said, "It was there that the battle of 
Waterloo was won." 

Children's amusements should be such as do not 
of themselves involve late hours, or tend directly 
to the premature developing of their young na- 
tures. They should not be such as are likely to 
become permanent occupations rather than tem- 
porary amusements; such as gain a stronger and 

stronger hold with the passing years instead of 

II 



l62 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

being outgrown with childhood; or such as open 
the way to the child's becoming a professional 
amusement-maker. They should be such as will 
have a centripetal rather than a centrifugal force, as 
related to the home circle. 

It ought to be so, in every well-ordered home, 
that a child can find more pleasure at home than 
away from home ; and this state of things will de- 
pend very much upon the kind of amusements that 
are secured in a child's home. It is not enough 
that there be amusements at the home, but the 
amusements there must be those that cannot be 
engaged in elsewhere as well as there. Many a 
parent makes the mistake of trying to keep his 
children at home by introducing amusements there 
that arouse in the children a desire to go elsewhere 
for something of the same sort in greater freshness 
or variety. But wiser parents secure to their chil- 
dren such home amusements as cannot be indulged 
in to the same advantage outside of that home. 

A child may have such a " baby-house," such a 
collection of dolls and doll-furniture, such a " play- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 1 63 

closet," such a store of building-blocks and me- 
chanical toys, such a cellar or such a garret, in his 
or her own home, as cannot be found in any other 
home. To be at home with these will be more 
attractive than to be in another home without them. 
There may be such an interest excited in scrap-book 
making, in picture-painting, in candy-making, with 
the advantages for carrying it on, at the child's 
home, that to go away from home would be a loss, 
so far, instead of a gain. Singing and music may 
be such a feature in the home life that the loss of it 
will be felt outside of that home. So it may be 
with those social games that involve a measure of 
intelligence and information not to be found in 
ordinary homes elsewhere. All such amusements 
partake of the centripetal rather than the centrifu- 
gal force, as related to the children's home ; and 
they have their advantage accordingly. It is for 
the parents to secure these for the children, or to 
incur the penalty of their lack. 

Children will have amusements, whether their 
parents choose their amusements for them, or leave 



1 64- HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

the children to choose them for themselves. The 
amusements of children will tend to the gain or to 
the loss of the children. It is for parents to decide 
whether the children shall be left to choose their 
own amusements, with the probability of their 
choosing to their own harm ; or whether the 
parents shall choose helpful amusements for their 
children, and shall make these amusements more 
attractive than the harmful ones. The result of 
this choice is an important one to the parents, and 
a yet more important one to the children. 



XVII. 

TRAINING A CHILD TO COURTESY. 



Unless a man is courteous toward others, he is 
at a disadvantage in the world, even though he be 
the possessor of every other good trait and quality 
possible to humanity, and of every material, mental, 
and spiritual acquisition which can belong to mere 
man. And if a man be marked by exceptional 
courtesy in all his intercourse with others, he has 
an advantage to start with in the struggle of life, 
beyond all that could be his in health and wealth 
and wisdom without courtesy. Yet courtesy is 
never wholly a natural quality. It is always a 
result of training ; albeit the training will be far 
easier in one case than in another. 

Courtesy is the external manifestation of a right 

spirit toward others. Its basis is in an unselfish 

and a fitting regard for the rights and feelings of 

165 



1 66 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

those with whom one is brought into intercourse; 
but the principles of its expression must be a mat- 
ter of wise study on the part of those who have 
had experience in the ways of the world, and who 
would give the benefit of their experience to those 
who come after them. Courtesy is not merely a 
surface finish of manners ; although courtesy is 
sure to show itself in a finished surface of manners. 
Good breeding, politeness, and fine manners, are all 
included in the term " courtesy ; " but these all are 
the expression of courtesy, rather than its essence 
and inspiration. " Good breeding," says one, " is 
made up of a multitude of petty sacrifices." " True 
politeness," says another, " is the spirit of benevo- 
lence showing itself in a refined way. It is the 
expression of good-will and kindness." Fine man- 
ners, De Quincey says, consist " in two capital 
features: first of all, respect of others; secondly, 
in self-respect." 

The courteous man is sure not to be lacking in 
self-respect, but he is sure to be lacking in self- 
assertion. His self-respect is shown in his sense 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 15/ 

of a responsibility for the comfort and welfare of 
others ; and his unselfish interest in others causes 
him to lose all thought of himself in his effort to 
discharge his responsibility toward others. His 
courtesy will be evidenced in what he is ready to 
do for others, rather than in what he seems to look 
for from others. • 

Attractiveness of personal appearance, graceful- 
ness in bearing, tastefulness in dress, elegance in 
manners, and carefulness in word and tone of voice, 
may, indeed, all be found where there is no true 
courtesy. The very purpose on the part of their 
possessor to be thought courteous, to command 
respect, and to appear to advantage, may cause 
him or her to show a lack of courtesy, to fail of 
commanding respect, and to appear far otherwise 
than advantageously. On the other hand, there 
are, for example, ladies whose attractions of face 
and form are but slight, who care little for dress, 
who pay no attention to mere manners, who are 
yet so unselfishly thoughtful of others, in all their 
intercourse with them, that they are called "just 



1 68 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

delightful" by everybody who knows them. When 
they have callers, or when they are making calls, 
they have absolutely no thought about themselves, 
their appearance, their modes of expression, or the 
impression they may make on others. They are 
for the time being absolutely given up to those 
with whom they converse. They question and 
listen with enthusiastic interest; they say kindly 
words because they feel kindly; they avoid un- 
pleasant subjects of mention, and they introduce 
topics that cannot but be welcome. Because they 
keep self out of sight, they win respect, admiration, 
and affection, beyond all that they would dare hope 
for. And many a man shows a similar self-for- 
getfulness in his courteous interest in others, and 
wins a loving recognition of his courtesy on every 
side. Real courtesy is, however, impossible, in 
either sex, except where self is practically lost 
sight of 

In training a child to courtesy, it is of little use 
to tell him to be forgetful of himself; but it is of 
value to tell him to be thoughtful of others. The 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 169 

more a person tries to forget himself, the surer he 
will be to think of himself Often, indeed, it is the 
very effort of a person to forget himself, that makes 
that person painfully self-conscious, and causes him 
to seem bashful and embarrassed. But when a 
child thinks of others, his thoughts go away from 
himself, and self-forgetfulness is a result, rather 
than a cause, of his action. 

To tell a young person to enter a full room with- 
out any show of embarrassment, or thought of 
himself, is to put a barrier in the way of his being 
self-possessed through self-forgetfulness. But to 
send a young person into a full room with a life- 
and-death message to some one already there, is to 
cause him to forget himself through filling him 
with thought of another. And this distinction in 
methods of training is one to be borne in mind in 
all endeavors at training children to courtesy. 

In order to be courteous, a child must have a 
care to give due deference to others, in his ordinary 
salutations and greetings, and in his expression of 
thanks for every kindness or attention shown to 



I/O . HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

him. So far most parents, who give any thought 
to a matter Hke this, are ready to go. But true 
courtesy includes a great deal more than this ; and 
a child needs training accordingly. 

Many a boy who is careful to give a respectful 
greeting to his superiors on the street, or in the 
house, and who never fails to proffer thanks for any 
special favor shown to him, lacks greatly in cour- 
tesy in his ordinary intercourse with others, be- 
cause he has not been trained to feel and to show 
an unselfish interest in those with whom he is 
brought face to face. Such a boy is more ready 
to talk of himself, and of that which has a per- 
sonal interest to him, than to find out what has an 
interest to others, and to make himself interested 
in that, or to express his interest in it if he already 
feels such an interest. If, indeed, from any reason, 
he finds himself unable to talk freely of that which 
immediately concerns him, he is often at a loss for 
a topic of conversation, and is liable to show awk- 
wardness and embarrassment in consequence. And 
so while courteous at points of conventional eti- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. I/I 

quette, a boy of this sort is constantly exhibiting 
his lack of courtesy. 

This liability of a child must be borne in mind 
by his parents in his training, and it must be 
guarded against by wise counsel and by watchful 
inquiry on their part. When a child has a play- 
mate with him in his home, he must be trained 
to make it his first business to find out what that 
playmate would enjoy, and to shape his own words 
and ways in conformity with that standard, for the 
time being. When a child is going into another 
home, he must be told in advance of his duty to 
be a sharer with those whom he meets there, in 
their employments and pleasures, and to express 
heartily his sense of enjoyment in that which 
pleases them. When he returns from a visit from 
another home, he should be asked to tell what he 
found of interest there, and what he said about it 
while there; and he should be commended or 
counseled in proportion to his well-doing or his 
lack in his exhibit of courtesy in this connection. 
When he has been talking with an older person, 



1/2 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

in his own home or abroad, his parents ought to 
ascertain just how far he has been lacking in 
courtesy by putting himself forward unduly, or 
how far he has shown courtesy by having and 
evidencing an interest in that which was said to 
him or done for him by his superior ; and kindly 
comment on his course should be given to him 
by his parents at such a time. 

If, indeed, a child has shown any lack of cour- 
tesy toward another, whether a person of his own 
age or older, he should be instructed to be frank 
and outspoken in expression of his regret for his 
course, and of his desire to be forgiven for his 
fault. True courtesy involves a readiness to apolo- 
gize for any and every failure, whether intentional 
or unintentional, to do or say just that which 
ought to have been done or said; and the habit 
of frank apologizing is acquired by a child only 
through his careful training in that direction. He 
who has any reluctance to proffer apologies on 
even the slightest cause for them, is sadly lacking 
in the spirit of courtesy; for just so far as one is 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 1/3 

thoughtfully considerate of the feelings of another 
will he want to express his regret that any perform- 
ance or failure on his part has been a cause of 
discomfort to another. 

All this is, of course, a trying matter to a child, 
and a taxing matter to a parent; but it is to the 
obvious advantage of both parties. If a child is 
seen to be lacking in courtesy, his parents are 
understood to be at fault in his training, so far. If, 
on the other hand, a child is not trained to courtesy 
while a child, he is at a disadvantage from his lack 
of training, as long as he lives. If he has not been 
trained to give others the first place in his thoughts 
, while he is with them, and to give open expression 
to all the interest in them which he really has, he 
cannot be free and unembarrassed in conversation 
with any and all whom he meets. If, on the other 
hand, he has had wise and careful training in this 
direction, he is sure to be as pleasing as he is cour- 
teous to others ; and to receive as much enjoyment 
as he gives, through his courtesy in intercourse 
with all whom he meets. 



174 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

Personal embarrassment in the presence of 
others, and a lack of freedom in the expression 
of one's interest in others, are generally the result 
of an undue absorption in one's own interests or 
appearance, and of one's lack of self-forgetful in- 
terest in the words and ways and needs of those 
whom he is summoned to meet. The surest pro- 
tection of one's children against these misfortunes, 
is by the wise training of those children to have an 
interest in others, and to give expression to that 
interest, whenever they are with others, at home or 
abroad; and so to be courteous and to show their 
courtesy as a result of such training. 



XVIII. 

CULTIVATING A CHILD S TASTE 
IN READING, 



" Reading is to the mind what exercise is to 
the body," says Addison. "As, by the one, health 
is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated ; by 
the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) 
is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed." And Dr. 
Johnson adds, " The foundation of knowledge 
must be laid by reading," 

But there is reading, and reading ; there is read- 
ing that debilitates and debases the mind; as there 
is reading that strengthens and invigorates it. 
There is reading that forms the basis of knowl- 
edge, and there is reading that lessens the reader's 
desire for knowledge. A love of reading is an 
acquired taste, not an instinctive preference. The 
habit of reading is formed in childhood ; and a 

175 



176 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

child's taste in reading is formed in the right direc- 
tion or in the wrong one while he is under the 
influence of his parents; and they are directly 
responsible for the shaping and cultivating of 
that taste. 

A child ought to read books that are helpful to 
his growth in character and in knowledge ; and a 
child ought to love to read these books. A child 
will love to read such books as his parents train, 
or permit, him to find pleasure in reading. It is 
the parent who settles this question — by action or 
by inaction. It is the child who reaps the con- 
sequences of his parents' fidelity or lack in this 
sphere. 

Of course, it is not to be understood that a child 
is to read, and to love to read, only those books 
which add to his stock of knowledge, or which 
immediately tend to the improvement of his 
morals ; for there is as legitimate a place for 
amusement and for the lighter play of imagina- 
tion in a child's reading, as there is for recreation 
and laughter in the sphere of his physical train- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. I// 

ing. As one of the fathers of EngHsh poetry has 
told us, 

" Books should to one of these four ends conduce, 
For wisdom, piety, delight, or use;" 

and that reading which conduces merely to "de- 
light " for the time being, has its essential part in 
the formation of a character that includes wisdom 
and piety and useful knowledge. But it is to be 
understood that no child should be left to read 
only those books to which his untutored tastes 
naturally incline him ; nor should he be made to 
read other books simply as a dry task. His taste 
for instructive books as well as for amusing ones 
should be so cultivated by the judicious and per- 
sistent endeavors of his parents, that he will find 
enjoyment in the one class as truly as in the 
other. 

" Nonsense songs " and the rhymes of " Mother 
Goose " are not to be undervalued, in their place, 
as a means of amusement and of attraction in the 
direction of a child's earliest reading. Their mis- 



178 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

sion in this realm is as real as that of the toy rattle 
in the education of a child's ear, or the dancing- 
jack in the training of his eye. But these helps to 
amusement are to be looked upon only as aids 
toward something better; not as in themselves 
sufficient to an end. So, also, it is with the better 
class of fairy tales. They meet a want in a child's 
mind in the developing and exercising of his im- 
agination ; and he who has never read them will 
inevitably lack something of that incitement and 
enjoyment in the realm of fancy which they supply 
so liberally. But it is only a beginning of good 
work in the sphere of a child's reading, when he 
has found that there is amusement there together 
with food for his imagination and fancy. And it is 
for the parent to see that the work thus begun does 
not stop at its beginning. 

There is a place for fiction in the matter of a 
child's reading. Good impressions can be made 
on a child's mind, and his feelings can be swayed 
in the direction of the right, by means of a story 
that is fictitious without being false. And thus it is 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 1 79 

that the average Sunday-school library book has its 
mission in the work of child-training. But fiction 
ought not to be the chief factor in any child's read- 
ing, nor can influence and impressions take the 
place of instruction and information in the proper 
filling of his mind's treasure-chambers. Even if a 
child were to read only the best religious " story- 
books " which the world's literature proffers to 
him, this reading by itself would not tend to the 
development of his highest mental faculties, or to 
the fostering of his truest manhood. Unless he 
reads also that which adds to his stock of knowl- 
edge, and which gives him a fresh interest in the 
events and personages of the world's history, a 
child cannot obey the Divine injunction to grow 
in knowledge as well as in grace, and he will be 
the loser by his lack. 

That a child is inclined by nature to prefer an 
amusing or an exciting story-book to a book of 
straightforward fact, everybody knows. But that 
is no reason why a child should follow his own 
unguided tastes in the m.atter of reading, any more 



l8o HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

than he should be permitted to indulge at all times 
his preference, in the realm of appetite, for sweet 
cakes instead of bread and butter, or for candies 
rather than meat and potatoes. "A child left to 
himself causeth shame to his mother," — and dis- 
honor to himself, in one sphere of action as in 
another ; and unless a parent cultivates a taste for 
right reading of every sort on a child's part, that 
child can never be at his best in the world, nor can 
his parents have such delight in his attainments as 
otherwise they might have. 

A wise parent can train his children to an inter- 
est in any book in which they ought to be in- 
terested. He can cultivate in their minds such a 
taste for books of histoiy, of biography, of travel, 
of popular science, and of other useful knowledge, 
that they will find in these books a higher and 
more satisfying pleasure than is found by their 
companions in the exciting or delusive narrations 
of fiction and fancy. Illustrations of this possibil- 
ity are to be seen on every side. There are boys 
and girls of ten and twelve years of age whose 



HINTS ON CHILD - 77?^ INING. 1 8 1 

chief delight in reading is in the realm of instruc- 
tive fact, and who count it beneath them to take 
time for the reading of fictitious story-books — 
religious or sensational. And if more parents 
were wise and faithful in this department of child- 
training, there would be more children with this 
elevated taste in their reading. 

It is, however, by no means an easy matter, even 
though it be a simple one, for a parent to cultivate 
wisely the taste of his children in their reading. 
He must, to begin with, recognize the importance 
and magnitude of his work so far, and must give 
himself to it from the earlier years of his children 
until they are well established in the good habits 
he has aided them to form. He must know what 
books his children ought to read, and what books 
ought to be kept away from them. Then he must 
set himself to make the good books attractive to 
his children, while he resolutely shuts out from 
their range of reading those books which are per- 
nicious. All this takes time, and thought, and 
patience, and determination, and intelligent en- 



l82 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

deavor on his part ; but it is work that is remunera- 
tive beyond its extremest cost. 

The exclusion of that which is evil is peculiarly 
important in this realm of effort ; for if a child has 
once gained a love of the exciting incidents of the 
book of sensational fiction, it is doubly difficult to 
win him to a love of narrations of sober and in- 
structive fact. Hence every parent should see to it 
that his child is permitted no indulgence in the 
reading of high-colored and over-wrought works 
of fiction presented in the guise of truth — with or 
without a moral ; whether they come in books from 
a neighbor's house, or as a Christmas or birthday 
gift from a relative, or are brought from the Sunday- 
school library. Fairy tales are well enough in their 
time and way, if they are read as fairy tales, and 
are worth the reading — are the best of their kind. 
Fiction has its place in a child's reading, within due 
bounds of measure and quality. But neither fancy 
nor fiction is to be tolerated in a child's reading in 
such a form as to excite the mind, or to vitiate the 
taste of the child. And for the limitation of such 



HINTS ON CHILD- TRA INING. 1 8 3 

reading by a child the child's parent must hold 
himself always responsible. No pains should be 
spared to guard the child from mental as well as 
from physical poison. 

Keeping bad books away from a child is, how- 
ever, only one part of the work to be done in the 
effort at cultivating a child's taste in reading. A 
child must be led to have an intelligent interest in 
books that are likely to be helpful to him ; and this 
task calls for skill and tact, as well as patience and 
persistency on the parent's part. Good books must 
be looked up by the parent, and when they are put 
into the child's hand it must be with such words of 
commendation and explanation as to awaken in the 
child's mind a desire to become possessed of their 
contents. The sex and age and characteristics and 
tendencies of the child, as well as the circumstances 
and associations of the hour, must all be borne in 
mind in the choice and presentation of the book or 
books for a child's reading ; and a due regard to 
these incidents will have its effect on the mind of 
the child under training. 



1 84 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

For example, when the Fourth of July Is at 
hand, or is in some way brought into notice, then 
is a good time to tell a child briefly about the war 
of the American Revolution, and to give him a 
book about the Boys of 'Seventy-six. When his 
attention is called to a picture of the Tower of 
London, he is in a good mood to read some of the 
more impressive stories of English history. If he 
is at the seashore, or among the mountains, on a 
visit, he can be shown some object of nature, — a 
shell or a crab, a rock or a tree, — as a means of 
interesting him in a little book about this or that 
phase of natural history or of woodcraft. 

A child's question about Jerusalem, or Athens, 
or Rome, may be improved to his advantage by 
pointing him to the narrative of the Children's 
Crusade, or to some of the collections of classic 
stories in guise for children. An incidental refer- 
ence to Africa, or India, or the South Sea Islands, 
may open the way for a talk with a child about 
missions in those parts of the world, and may be 
used to give him an interest in some of the more 



//mrs aiy child - tra .ning. i 8 5 

attractive bot-ks in description of missionary heroes 
ancient and modern. The every-day mentions of 
men and things may, each and all of them, in 
their order, be turned to good account, as a help 
in cultivating a taste in reading, by a parent who 
is alert to make use of such opportunities. 

A parent ought to be constantly on the watch to 
suggest books that are suitable for his child's read- 
ing, and to incite his child to an interest in those 
books. It is a good plan to talk with a child in 
advance about the subject treated in a book, which 
the parent is disposed to commend, and to tell 
the child that which will tend to awaken his v/ish 
to know more about it, as preparatory to handing 
the book to him. Reading with the child, and 
questioning the child concerning his reading, will 
intensify the child's interest in his reading, and 
will promote his enjoyment as he reads. 

And so it is that a child's taste in reading will 
be cultivated steadily and effectively in the right 
direction by any parent who is willing to do the 
work that is needful, and *ho is able to do it 



1 86 HINTS^ ON CHILD - TR. 1 INING. 

wisely. A child needs help in this sphere, and 
he welcomes help when it is brought to him. If 
the help be given him, he will find pleasure as well 
as profit in its using; but if he goes on without 
help, he is liable to go astray, and to be a life- 
time sufferer in consequence. 



XIX. 

THE VALUE OF TABLE-TALK. 



In proportion as man rises in the intellectual 
scale, does he give prominence to mental and moral 
enjoyments in conjunction with his daily meals. He 
who looks upon the table merely as a place for 
feeding the body, is so far upon the level of the 
lower order of animals. He who would improve 
his time there for the advantage of his mind and 
character, as well as for the supply of his physical 
wants, recognizes a standard of utility in the hum- 
bler offices of daily life that is perceptible only to 
one whose higher nature is always striving for 
supremacy above the lower. 

With all the tendency to excesses in the line of 
appetite among the Greeks and Romans in classic 
times, there were even then gleams of a higher 

enjoyment at the table through social intercourse 

187 



1 88 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

than that which mere eating and drinking supplied. 
When the Perfect Man was here among men, he 
showed the possibiHty of making the household 
meal a means of mental and spiritual improving; 
and there are no profounder or more precious 
truths in the record of our Lord's earthly teach- 
ings, than those which are found in his words 
spoken to those who sat with him eating and 
drinking at their common meal. The "table talk" 
of great men has, for centuries, been recognized as 
having a freeness, a simplicity, and a forcefulness, 
not to be found in their words spoken elsewhere. 

There are obvious reasons why the social talk 
at daily meals should possess a value not attain- 
able under other circumstances, in the ordinary 
Christian household. Just there is the place where 
all the members of the family must be together. 
However closely and however diversely they may 
be occupied at other times, when the hour for the 
household meal has arrived, everything else must 
be dropped by them all for the one duty of eating 
and drinking; and they must all come together 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 1 89 

for that common purpose. In the very nature of 
things, too, those who have gathered at the family 
table must, for the time being, have left all their work 
behind them, and be in a state of relaxation and of 
kindlier feeling accordingly. Now it is, therefore, 
that they are freest to speak with one another of 
matters having a common interest to all, rather than 
to dwell in absorbed thought on the special duties 
from which they have, severally, turned away, or 
toward which they must turn at the meal's close. 

It is a matter of fact that those who sit together 
at a family table, whether as members of the house- 
hold or as guests there for a season, learn to under- 
stand one another, and to give and receive help and 
inspiration in their social converse, as they could 
not without the advantage of this distinctive op- 
portunity. It is also a fact that only now and then 
is there a family circle the members of which rec- 
ognize at the fullest, and make available at the 
best, the value of table-talk as a training agency 
for all who have a share in it, or who are under its 
immediate influence. Yet he who w^ould train his 



I go HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

children as they should be trained, cannot ignore 
this important training agency without serious and 
permanent loss to them. 

With family customs as they are in the United 
States, there is more of an opportunity here than 
abroad, for the training of children by means of 
table-talk. In England, and in Europe generally, 
young children are likely to be by themselves with 
nurses or governesses, at meal-time, rather than at 
the table with their parents. But in this country 
children are, as a rule, brought to the family table 
at a very early age, and are permitted to be there 
not merely while the members of the family are 
there gathered, but on occasions when a guest is, 
for the time being;, made a member of the house- 
hold circle. Therefore it is that an important fea- 
ture of child-training in American families is the 
table-talk in those families. This feature varies 
much in different homes; but at its best it is one 
of the most potent factors in the intellectual and 
moral training of the young. 

Fifty years ago a gentleman of New England 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. I9I 

had, as a philanthropist, an educator, and an 
author, an exceptional acquaintance with men of 
prominence in similar fields of endeavor in this 
country and abroad. His home was a place of 
resort for them. He had a large family of chil- 
dren, all of whom were permitted to be at the 
family table while those guests were present, as 
well as at other times. The table-talk in that home, 
between the parents and the guests, or between 
the parents and their children when no guests were 
present, was in itself "a liberal education." It 
gave to those children a general knowledge such 
as they could hardly have obtained otherwise. 
It was a source of promptings and of inspiration 
to them in a multitude of directions. Now that 
they are themselves parents and grandparents, they 
perceive how greatly they were the gainers by 
their training through the table-talk of their early 
home; and they are doing what they can to have 
the value of table-talk as a training agency for the 
young recognized and made effective in the homes 
which they direct or influence. 



1 92 HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 

In another New England home, the father was 
a man of quiet thoughtfulness, and at ordinary- 
times a man of peculiar reticence before his chil- 
dren. But at the family table he was accustomed 
to unbend as nowhere else. He, also, had a large 
family of children, and there were frequent visitors 
among them. The utmost freedom of question 
and of expression was cultivated in the table-talk 
of that home. The spirited discussions carried on 
there, between father and mother and children and 
visitors, were instructive, suggestive, and stimulat- 
ing, in a very high degree. The family table was, 
in fact, the intellectual and moral center of that 
home. No other place was so attractive as that. 
Not a person, young or old, would leave that 
table until he had to; and now that the survivors 
of that happy circle are scattered widely, every 
one of them will say that no training agency did 
more for him in his early life than the table-talk of 
his childhood's home. 

In one home, where parents and children enjoy 
themselves in familiar and profitable table-talk, it 



HINTS ON CHILD - TEA INING, 1 93 

is a custom to settle on the spot every question 
that may be incidentally raised as to the pro- 
nunciation or meaning of a word, the date of a 
personage in ancient or modern history, the loca- 
tion of a geographical site, or anything else of that 
nature that comes into discussion at the family 
table. As an aid to knowledge in these lines, 
there stands in a corner of the dining-room a 
book-rest, on the top of which lies an English 
dictionary, while on the shelves below are a bio- 
graphical dictionary and a pronouncing gazeteer 
of the world, ready for instant reference in every 
case of dispute or doubt. 

At the breakfast-table, in that home, the father 
runs his eye over the morning paper, and gives to 
his family the main points of its news which he 
deems worthy of special note in the family circle. 
The children there are free to tell of what they 
have studied in school, or to ask about points that 
have been raised by their teachers or companions. 
And in such ways the children are trained to an 
intelligent interest in a variety and range of sub- 



194 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

jects that would otherwise be quite beyond their 
ordinary obsei"vation. 

One father has been accustomed to treasure up 
the best things of his experience or studies for 
each day, with a view to bringing them attractively 
to the attention of his children at the family table, 
at the day's close, or at the next day's beginning. 
Another has had the habit of selecting a special 
topic for conversation at the dinner-table a day in 
advance, in order that the children may prepare 
themselves, by thinking or reading, for a share in 
the conversation. Thus an item in the morning 
paper may suggest an inquiry about Bismarck, or 
Gladstone, or Parnell, or Henry M. Stanley; and 
the father will say, " Now let us have that man be- 
fore us for our talk to-morrow at dinner. Find 
out all you can about him, and we will help one 
another to a fuller knowledge of him." In this 
way the children are being trained to an ever- 
broadening interest in men and things in the 
world's affairs, and to methods of thought and 
study in their search for knowledge. 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, I95 

There is no end to the modes of conducting 
table-talk as a means of child-training; and there 
is no end to the influence of table-talk in this 
direction, however conducted. Indeed, it may be 
said with truth, that table-talk is quite as likely to 
be influential as a means of child-traininp; when 
the parents have no thought of using it to this 
end, as when they seek to use it accordingly. At 
every family table there is sure to be talking; and 
the talk that is heard at the family table is sure to 
have its part in a child's training, whether the 
parents wish it to be so or not. 

There are fathers whose table-talk is chiefly in 
complaint of the family cooking, or in criticism of 
the mother's method of managing the household. 
There are mothers who are more given to asking 
where on earth their children learned to talk and 
act as they do, than to inquiring in what part of 
the earth the m.ost important archaeological dis- 
coveries are just now in progress. And there are 
still more fathers and mothers whose table-talk is 
wholly between themselves, except as they turn 



196 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

aside, occasionally, to say sharply to their little 
ones, "Why don't you keep still, children, while 
your father and mother are talking?" All this 
table-talk has its influence on the children. It 
leads them to have less respect for their parents, 
and less interest in the home table except as a 
place of satisfying their natural hunger. It is 
potent, even though it be not profitable. 

Table-talk ought to be such, in every family, as 
to make the hour of home meal-time one of the 
most attractive as well as one of the most bene- 
ficial hours of the day to all the children. But in 
order to make table-talk valuable, parents must 
have something to talk about at the table, must 
be willing to talk about it there, and must have 
the children lovingly in mind as they do their 
table-talking. 



XX. 

GUIDING A CHILD IN 
COMPANIONSHIPS. 



A child cannot easily go on through childhood 
without companions, even if it were desirable for 
him to do so. Moreover, it is not desirable for a 
child to go on through childhood without compan- 
ions, even if it were every way practicable for him 
to do so. Companions are a necessity to a child, 
whether the case be looked at in the light of the 
world as it is, or in the light of the world as it 
ought to be. Hence, as a child will have compan- 
ions, and as he needs to have them, it is doubly im- 
portant that a parent be alive to the importance of 
guiding his every child in the choice of his com- 
panions and in his relations to those companions 
whom he has without choosing. 

No child can be rightly trained all by himself, 

197 



198 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

nor yet wholly by means of those agencies and 
influences that come to him directly from above 
his head. There are forces which operate for a 
child's training through being brought to bear 
upon him laterally rather than perpendicularly; 
coming in upon him by way of his sympathies, in- 
stead of by way of his natural desire for knowl- 
edge. There are lessons which a child cannot 
learn so well from an elder teacher above him as 
from a young teacher alongside of him. There 
are impulses which can never be at their fullest 
with a child when he is alone as a child, but which 
will fill and sway him when they are operative 
upon him as one of a little company of children. 
Only as he learns these lessons from, and receives 
these impulses with, wisely chosen and fitting com- 
panions, can a child have the benefit of them to 
which he is fairly entitled. 

Any observing parent will testify that, on more 
than one occasion, his child has come to him with 
a new interest in a thought or a theme, inspired by 
the words or example of a young companion, to 



HINTS ON CHILD - TEA INING. 1 99 

the surprise of the parent — who had before sought 
in vain to excite an interest in that very direction. 
All that the parent had said on the subject had 
been of no value, in comparison with that which 
had been said or done by the child's companion, 
as another self Again, there are few parents who 
have not found to their regret that their child has 
received lessons and impulses directly opposed to 
all the parental counsel and purposes, through a 
brief and comparatively unnoticed companionship 
that ought to have been guarded against. And 
these are but illustrations of the instructive and 
swaying power of child companionships. Such a 
power as this ought not to be ignored or slighted 
by any parent who would do most and best for 
his child's wise training. 

Any thoughtful parent will realize that a child 
cannot be trained to be unselfishly considerate of 
his companions; to bear and forbear with compan- 
ions who are weak or impatient or exacting; to 
show sympathy with companions who need sym- 
pathy, and to minister lovingly to companions who 



200 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

deserve a loving ministry, — unless he has compan- 
ions toward whom he can thus exercise and evi- 
dence a right spirit at all times. And no parent 
will say, or think, that it would be well for a child 
to be without these elements of character-training 
in his . life-progress. 

An only child is naturally at a disadvantage in 
his home, because he is an only child. He lacks 
the lessons which playmates there would give him; 
the impulses and inspirations which he would re- 
ceive from their fellowship; the demands on his 
better nature, and the calls on his self-control and 
self-denial, which would come from their require- 
ments. Parents who have but one child ought to 
see to it that the lack in this regard is, in a measure, 
supplied by the companionships of children from 
other homes. It Is, Indeed, a mistake for any 
parent to attempt the training of his child with- 
out the help of child companionships. No child 
can be so inspiringly and symmetrically trained 
without, as with, these. Even where there are 
half a dozen or more children in one family, there 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 20I 

is still a need of outside companions for each 
child, of the same age and wants of that child ; 
for it is not possible for any person to bring 
himself into the same relations with a child as 
can be entered into by a child of his own years 
and requirements. 

Because a child's companionships are so influen- 
tial, it is the more important that they be closely 
watched and carefully guided by the child's parents. 
In choosing a neighborhood — for a residence or 
for a summer vacation ; in choosing a week-day 
school ; in choosing a Sunday-school, where a 
choice is open to the parents, the companionships 
thus secured to their child ought to have promi- 
nence in the minds of the parents. And when the 
neighborhood, and week-day school, and Sunday- 
school, are finally fixed upon, the responsibility is 
still upon the parent to see to it that the best avail- 
able companionships there are cultivated, and the 
most undesirable ones are shunned, by the child. 
Neglect or carelessness at this point may be a 
means of harm to the child for his lifetime. Atten- 



202 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

tion just here may do more for him than were pos- 
sible through any other agency. 

It is a parent's duty to know who are his child's 
companions, and to know the character, and course 
of conduct, and influence upon his child, of every 
one of those companions separately. Here is 
where a parent's chief work is called for in the 
matter of guiding and controlling his child's com- 
panionships. A parent must have his child's sym- 
pathy, in order to gain this knowledge; and a 
parent must give his sympathy to his child, in 
order to be able to use this knowledge wisely. 
It may be necessary to keep an open house 
for these companions, and an open heart and 
hand to them personally, as it surely is neces- 
sary to keep an open ear to the child's confi- 
dences concerning their sayings and doings, if the 
parent would know all about them that he needs to 
know. There are parents who do all this for and 
with their children, as an effective mealis of guiding 
those children in their companionships. It is a 
pity that there are not more who are willing to do 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 203 

it, in view of all that it may be a means of accom- 
plishing for children. 

Knowing his child's companionships, a parent 
ought to encourage such of them as are w^orthiest, 
and discourage such as he cannot approve. He 
ought to help his child to see the advantages of the 
one class and the disadvantages of the other, and 
to regulate his social intimacies according to the 
standards thus set before him. It will not do for a 
parent to allow matters in this line to take their 
own course, and to accept all companionships for 
his child just as they may come to him. He must 
feel responsible for his child's wise selection, from 
among the number of proffered companions, of 
those who are to be retained while others are 
dropped or avoided. And it devolves upon a 
parent to see to it that his child's companionships 
are of growing value to his companions as well as 
to himself; that his child's influence over his very 
playfellows is for their good, while his good is pro- 
moted by their association with him. A child's 
companionships, like those of older persons, ought 



204 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

to be of advantage to both parties alike, through 
the very purpose of making them so. 

Recognizing the desirableness and importance 
of companionships for his child, securing the best 
that are available, learning fully their characteristics 
and tendencies, aiding in their sifting, and seeking 
in their steady uplifting, a parent can do effective 
service in the way of guiding his child in and 
through that child's companionships. To neglect 
this agency of a child's training, would be to en- 
danger his entire career in life, whatever else were 
done in his behalf. 



XXI. 

NEVER PUNISH A CHILD IN ANGER. 



Anger is not always wrong. A parent may be 
angry without sin. And, as a matter of fact, most 
parents do get angry, whether they ought to or 
not. Children are sometimes very provoking, and 
parents are sometimes very much provoked. It is 
not always wrong to punish a child. A child may 
need punishing, and it may be a parent's duty to 
punish a child accordingly. But it is always wrong 
for a parent to punish a child in anger; and how- 
ever great may be the need of a child's punishing, 
a parent ought never to administer punishment to 
a child while angry. 

Here is a rule which, strictly speaking, knows 

no exception; yet, as a matter of fact, probably 

nine-tenths of all the punishing of children that is 

done by parents in this world is done in anger. 

205 



206 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

And this is one of the wrongs suffered by children 
through the wrong-doing of their parents. 

Anger is hot blood. Anger is passion. Anger 
is for the time being a controlling emotion, fixing 
the mind's eye on the one point against which it is 
specifically directed, to the forgetfulness of all else. 
But punishment is a judicial act, calling for a clear 
mind, and a cool head, and a fair considering of 
every side of the case in hand. Anger is incon- 
sistent with the exercise of the judicial faculty; 
therefore no person is competent to judge fairly 
wdiile angry. 

If, indeed, in any given case, the anger itself be 
just, the impulse of the angry man may be in the 
right direction, and the punishment he would in- 
flict a fitting one ; but, again, his impulse may be 
toward a punishment that is not merited. At all 
events, the man is not in a frame of mind to decide 
whether or not his impulse is a wise one; and it is 
his duty to wait until he can dispassionately view 
the case in another light than that in which it pre- 
sents itself to his heated brain. No judge is 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 20/ 

worthy of the office he administers, if he acts on 
the impulse of his first estimate of a case before 
him, without taking time to see what can be shown 
on the other side of that case. And no parent acts 
worthily who jumps to the punishment of a child 
while under the impulse of an angry mood. 

There are strong provocatives to anger in many 
a child's conduct, especially to a parent who is of 
an intense nature, with an inclination to quickness 
of temper. A child is disobedient at a point where 
he has been repeatedly told of his duty; he is 
quarrelsome with his playmates, or insolent toward 
his nurse ; he is persistently irritable, or he gives 
way to a fit of ungovernable rage; he destroys 
property recklessly, or he endangers life and limb; 
he snatches away a plaything from a little brother, 
or he clutches his hands into his mother's hair; he 
indulges in foul language, or he utters threats of 
revenge; he meets a proffered kiss with a slap or 
a scratch; his conduct may be even that which 
would excite anger in a saint, but it certainly is 
such as to excite anger in the average parent — who 



208 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

is not a saint. Then, while the parent is angry, 
and while punishment seems merited by the child, 
the temptation of the parent is to administer punish- 
ment ; but that temptation is one that ought never 
to be yielded to, or, if yielded to, it is not with- 
out sin. 

Punishment may be needed in such a case, but 
the punishment, to be surely just and to be rec- 
ognized as just, must be well considered, and 
must be administered in a manner to show that 
it is not the outcome of passionate impulse. No 
punishment ought to be administered by a parent 
at any time that would not be administered by that 
parent when he was cool and calm and deliberate, 
and after he had had a full and free talk on the sub- 
ject with the child, in the child's best state of mind. 
Whether the punishment that seems to the parent 
to be the desert of the child, while the parent is 
still angry, is the punishment that the parent would 
deem the fitting one in his cooler, calmer moments, 
can be better decided after the parent has looked 
at it in both frames of mind, than before he has 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 209 

had the advantage of a view from the standpoint 
of fuller deliberation. 

"What?" inquired a surprised parent, in con- 
versing with the present writer on this very sub- 
ject, " do you say that I must never punish my 
boy while I'm angry with him ? Why then I 
should hardly ever punish him at all. It is while 
I am sitting up for him hour after hour, when I've 
told him over and over again that he must come in 
early, evenings, that I feel like taking hold of him 
smartly when he does come in. If I should say 
nothing to him then, but should leave the matter 
until the next morning, I should sleep off all my 
feeling on the subject, and he wouldn't be punished 
at all." And that father, in that statement of the 
case, spoke for many a parent, in the whole matter 
of the punishing of a child while angry. The pun- 
ishment which the child gets is the result of the 
passion of the parent, not of the parent's sense of 
justice; and the child knows this to be the case, 
whether the parent does or not. 

How many boxes of the ear, and shakings of the 
14 



2 1 HINTS ON CHILD - TEA INING, 

shoulders, and slappings and strikings, and sen- 
tences of doom, which the children now get from 
their parents, would never be given if only the 
parents refrained from giving these while angry, 
but waited until they themselves were calm and 
unruffled, before deciding whether to give them or 
not! It is not by any means easy for a parent 
always to control himself in his anger, so as to 
refrain from acting on the impulse which his anger 
imparts ; but he who has not control of himself is 
the last person in the world to attempt the control 
of others. And not until a parent has himself in 
perfect control ought he to take his child in hand 
for the judicial investigation and treatment of his 
case as an evil-doer. 

Of course, there are cases where instant action 
on the part of parents in checking or controlling 
their children's conduct is a necessity, whether 
the parent be excited or calm ; but in such cases 
the action, however vigorous or severe, is not in the 
line of punishment, but of conservation. A child 
may be thoughtlessly tugging away at the end of 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 211 

a table-cloth, with the liability of pulling over upon 
his head all the table crockery, including the scald- 
ing teapot; or he may be endangering himself by 
reaching out toward a lighted lamp, or an open 
razor. No time is to be lost. If the child does 
not respond to a word, he must be dealt with 
promptly and decisively. A sharp rap on the 
fingers may be the surest available means of sav- 
ing him from a disaster. 

So, again, a wayward child may be aiming a 
missile at a costly mirror, or at a playmate's head, 
in a fit of temper. Not a moment can then be 
wasted. Angry or not angry, the parent may have 
to clutch at the child's lifted arm to save property 
or life. In such a case, wise action is called for, 
regardless of the frame of mind of him who acts. 
But this is the action of the peacekeeper rather 
than of the minister of justice. The parent fills 
for the moment the place of the policeman on 
his beat, rather than of the judge on his bench. 
The question of punishment for the child's action 
is yet to be considered ; and that, again, must be 



212 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

delayed until there is no anger in the parent's 
mind. 

Anger, in the sense of hot indignation, may, in- 
deed, as has already been said, be, upon an occa- 
sion, a fitting exhibit of parental feeling ; but this 
is only in those utterly exceptional cases in which 
a child transcends all ordinary limits of misdoing, 
and is guilty of that which he himself knows to be 
intolerable. As Dr. Bushnell says at this point, 
" There are cases, now and then, in the outrageous 
and shocking misconduct of some boy, where an 
explosion is wanted; where the father represents 
God best by some terrible outburst of indignant 
violated feeling, and becomes an instant avenger, 
without any counsel or preparation whatever." But 
this is apart from all questions of punishment as 
punishment. 

A child knows when punishment is adminis- 
tered to him in anger, and when it is administered 
to him in a purely judicial frame of mind; and a 
child puts his estimate accordingly on him who 
administers the punishment. In a city mission- 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 2 1 3 

school, many years ago, there was a wild set of 
boys who seemed to do all in their power to anger 
and annoy their teachers. Cases of discipline were 
a necessity there; for again and again a boy at- 
tempted violence to a teacher, and force was 
required to save the teachers from serious harm. 
But love swayed those teachers even when force 
on their part was a necessity; and the boys seemed 
to understand this fully. 

There came a time, however, when the young 
superintendent of that school, who had often held 
a scholar in check by force, was made public sport 
of in such way, with the rude linking of a lady 
teacher's name with his in ridicule, that his self- 
control failed him for the moment, and he evi- 
dently showed this as he took hold of the offender 
with unwonted warmth. Instantly the boy started 
back in surprise, with the reproachful exclama- 
tion: "Trumbull, you're mad; and that's wicked." 
Those words taught a lesson to that young super- 
intendent which he has never forgotten. They 
showed him that his power over those rough boys 



214 HINTS OA CHILD -TRAINING. 

was a moral power, and that it pivoted on his 
retaining power over himself. It was theirs to 
get him angry if they could; but if they succeeded 
he was a failure, and they knew it. And that les- 
son is one that parents as well as superintendents 
could learn to advantage. 

When a parent punishes a child only in love, and 
without being ruffled by anger, the child is readier 
to perceive the justice of the punishment, and is 
junder no temptation to resent passion with passion. 
A child who had been told by her father, that if 
she did a certain thing he must punish her for it, 
came to him, on his return home, and informed 
him that she had transgressed in the thing for- 
bidden. He expressed sincere regret for this. 
" But you said, papa, that you would punish me 
for it," she added. "Yes, my dear child, and I 
must keep my word," was his answer. Then, as 
he drew her lovingly to him, he told her just why 
he must punish her. Looking up into his face 
with tearful trust, she said : " You don't like to 
punish me, — do you, papa?" " Indeed I don't, my 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 2 1 5 

darling," he said, in earnestness. " It hurts you 
more than it hurts me, — doesn't it, papa ? " was her 
sympathetic question, as if she were more troubled 
for her father than for herself " Yes, indeed it does, 
my darling child," was his loving rejoinder. And 
the punishment which that father gave and that 
daughter received under circumstances like these, 
was a cause of no chafing between the two even 
for the moment, while it broucrht its craln to both, 
as no act of punishment in anger, however just in 
itself, could ever bring, in such a case. 

As a rule, a child ought not to be punished 
except for an offense that, at the time of its com- 
mittal, was known by the child to be an offense 
deserving of punishment. It is no more fair for a 
parent to impose a penalty to an offense after the 
offense is committed, than it is for a civil govern- 
ment to pass an ex post facto law, by which punish- 
ment is to be awarded for offenses committed before 
that law was passed. And if a child understands, 
when he does a wrong, that he must expect a fixed 
punishment as its penalty, there is little danger of 



2l6 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

his feeling that his parent is unjust in administer- 
ing that punishment; and, certainly, there is no 
need of the parent hastening to administer that 
punishment while still angry. 

Punishment received by a child from an angry 
parent is an injury to both parent and child. The 
parent is the worse for yielding to the temptation 
to give way to anger against a child. The child 
is harmed by knowing that his parent has done 
wrong. A child can be taught to know that he 
deserves punishment. A child needs no teaching 
to know that his parent is wrong in punishing him 
while angry. No parent ought to punish a child 
except with a view to the child's good. And in 
order to do good to a child through his punishing, 
a parent must religiously refrain from punishing 
him while angiy. 



XXII. 
SCOLDING IS NEVER IN ORDER. 



Many a father who will not strike his child feels 
free to scold him. And a scolding mother is not 
always deemed the severest and most unjust of 
mothers. Yet, while it is sometimes right to strike 
a child, it is at no time right to scold one. Scolding 
is, in fact, never in order, in dealing with a child, 
or in any other duty in life. 

To ''scold" is to assail or revile with boisterous 

speech. The word itself seems to have a primary 

meaning akin to that of barking or howling. From 

its earliest use the term " scolding " has borne a 

bad reputation. In common law, "a common 

scold " is a public nuisance, against which the 

civil authority may be invoked by the disturbed 

neighborhood. This is a fact at the present time, 

as it was a fact in the days of old. And it is true 

217 



2l8 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

to-day as it was when spoken by John Skelton, 
four centuries ago, that 

"A sclaunderous timge, a tunge of a skolde, 
Worketh more mischiefe than can be tolde." 

Scolding is always an expression of a bad spirit 
and of a loss of temper. This is as truly the 
case when a lovely mother scolds her child for 
breaking his playthings wilfully, or for soiling his 
third dress in one forenoon by playing in the gut- 
ter which he was forbidden to approach, as when 
one apple-woman yells out her abuse of another 
apple-woman in a street-corner quarrel. In either 
case the essence of the scolding is in the multipli- 
cation of hot words in expression of strong feel- 
ings that, while eminently natural, ought to be held 
in better control. The words themselves may 
be very different in the two cases, but the spirit 
and method are much alike in both. It is scold- 
ing in the one case as in the other; and scolding 
is never in order. 

If a child has done wrong, a child needs talking 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 2ig 

to ; but no parent ought to talk to a child while 
that parent is unable to talk in a natural tone of 
voice, and with carefully measured words. If the 
parent is tempted to speak rapidly, or to multiply 
words without stopping to weigh them, or to show 
an excited state of feeling, the parent's first duty is 
to gain entire self-control. Until that control is 
secured, there is no use of the parent's trying to 
attempt any measure of child-training. The loss 
of self-control is for the time being an utter loss of 
power for the control of others. This is as true in 
one sphere as in another. 

Mr. Hammond's admirable work on "Dog- 
Training," already referred to in these pages, says 
on this very point, to the dog-trainer: "You must 
keep perfectly cool, and must suffer no sign to 
escape of any anger or impatience; for if you can- 
not control your temper, you are not the one to 
train a dog." "Do not allow yourself," says this 
instructor, " under any circumstances to speak to 
your pupil in anything but your ordinary tone of 
voice." And, recognizing the difficulties of the 



220 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

case, he adds: "Exercise an unwearied patience; 
and if at any time you find the strain upon your 
nerves growing a little tense, leave him at once, 
and wait until you are perfectly calm before resum- 
ing the lesson." That is good counsel for him who 
would train a dog — or a child ; for in either dog- 
training or child-training, scolding — loud and ex- 
cited talking — is never in order. 

In giving commands, or in giving censure, to a 
child, the fewer and the more calmly spoken 
words the better. A child soon learns that scold- 
ing means less than quiet talking; and he even 
comes to find a certain satisfaction in waiting 
silently until the scolder has blown off the surplus 
feeling which vents itself in this way. There are 
times, indeed, when words may be multiplied to 
advantage in explaining to a child the nature and 
consequences of his offense, and the reasons why 
he should do differently in the future; but such 
words should always be spoken in gentleness, and 
in self-controlled earnestness. Scolding — rapidly 
spoken censure and protest, in the exhibit of strong 



HINTS ON CHILD- TRA INING. 2 2 1 

feeling — is never in order as a means of training 
and directing a child. 

Most parents, even the gentler and kindlier 
parents, scold their children more or less. Rarely 
can a child say, " My parents never scold me." 
Many a child is well trained in spite of his being 
scolded. Many a parent is a good parent notwith- 
standing the fact that he scolds his children. But 
no child is ever helped or benefited by any scold- 
ing that he receives ; and no parent ever helps or 
benefits his child by means of a scolding. Scold- 
ing is not always ruinous, but it is always out 
of place. 

If, indeed, scolding has any good effect at all, 
that effect is on the scolder, and not on the scolded. 
Scolding is the outburst of strong feeling that 
struggles for the mastery under the pressure of 
some outside provocation. It never benefits the 
one against whom it is directed, nor yet those who 
are its outside observers, however it may give 
physical relief to the one who indulges in it. If, 
therefore, scolding is an unavoidable necessity on 



222 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

the part of any parent, let that parent at once shut 
himself, or herself, up, all alone, in a room where 
the scolding can be indulged in without harming 
any one. But let it be remembered that, as an 
element in child-training, scolding is never, never, 
in order. 



XXIII. 

DEALING TENDERLY WITH A 
CHILD S FEARS, 



The best child in the world is liable to be full of 
fears ; and the child who is full of fears deserves 
careful handling, in order that his fears may not 
gain permanent control of him. Fears are of a 
child's very nature, and every child's training must 
be in view of the fact that he has fears. How to 
deal wisely, firmly, and tenderly with a child's fears 
is, therefore, one of the important practical ques- 
tions in the training of a child. 

To begtn with, it should be understood that a 
child's fears are no sign of a child's weakness, but 
that, as a rule, the stronger a child is in the ele- 
ments of a well-balanced and an admirable char- 
acter, the more fears he will have to contend with 

in the exercise of his character. Hence a child's 

223 



224 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

fears are worthy of respect, and call for tenderness 
of treatment, instead of being looked at as a cause 
of ridicule or of severity on the part of those who 
observe them. 

" Fear " is not " cowardice." Fear is a keen per- 
ception of dangers, real or imaginary. Cowardice 
is a refusal to brave the dangers which the fears 
recognize. Fear is the evidence of manly sensi- 
tiveness. Cowardice is the exhibit of unmanly 
weakness. Fear is a moral attribute of humanity. 
Cowardice is a moral lack. A child, or a man, who 
is wholly free from cowardice, may have more fears 
than the veriest coward living. The one struggles 
successfully against his many fears ; the other 
yields in craven submission to the first fear that 
besets him. 

It is by no means to a child's credit that it can 
be said of him, " He doesn't know what fear is." 
A child ought to know what fear is. He is pitiably 
ignorant if he does not. The same is true of the 
bravest man. It is not the soldier who does not 
know fear but it is the soldier who will not yield 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 22^ 

to the fears he feels, who is the truly courageous 
man. Without a fine perception and a quick ap- 
prehension of dangers on every side,, no soldier 
could be fully alive to the necessities of his posi- 
tion and to the demands of his duty ; and it is, in 
a sense, peculiarly true, that the best soldier is likely 
to be the most fearful. It is the Braddocks who 
are ''not afraid" that needlessly suffer disaster; 
while the Washingtons who have timely fears are 
prepared to act efficiently in the time of disaster. 
There is a suggestion of this truth in the words of 
the Apostle, " Let him that thinketh he standeth 
take heed lest he fall ;" or, as it might be said. Let 
him who has no fears have a care lest he fail from 
his lack of fears. 

A child's fears are on various planes, and because 
of this they must be differently dealt with. A child 
has fears which are reasonable, fears which are un- 
reasoning, and fears which are wholly imaginary; 
fears which are the result of a process of reasoning, 
fears which are apart from any reasoning process, 

and fears which are in the realm of fancy and 

15 



226 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

imagination. In one child one phase of these fears 
is the more prominent, and in another child another 
phase. But in every child there is a measure of 
fear on all three of these planes. 

A child who has once fallen in trying to stand 
or walk, or from coming too near the top of a 
flight of stairs, is liable to be afraid that he will 
fall again if he makes another effort in the same 
direction. "A burnt child dreads the fire." That 
is a reasonable fear. Again, a child comes very 
early to an instinctive shrinking from trusting him- 
self to a stranger ; he recoils from an ill-appearing 
person or thing; he trembles at a loud noise; he 
is fearful because of the slamming of shutters, even 
when he knows that the wind does it; he is afraid 
of thunder as well as of lightning, apart from any 
question of harm to him from the electric bolt. 
This is without any process of reasoning on his 
part, even while there is a basis of reality in the 
causes of his fear. Yet again, a child is afraid of 
being alone in the darkness; or he is afraid of 
"ghosts" and "goblins," about which he has been 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 22/ 

told by others. It is his imagination that is at 
work in this case. 

That all these different fears should call for pre- 
cisely the same treatment is, of course, an absurdity. 
How to deal with each class of fears by itself, is an 
important element in the question before the parent 
who would treat wisely the fears of his children. 

A child would be obviously lacking in sense, if 
he were never afraid of the consequences of any 
action to which he was inclined. If he had no fear 
of falling, no fear of fire or water, no fear of edged 
tools or machinery, no fear of a moving vehicle, 
it would be an indication of his defectiveness 
in reasoning faculties. Yet that there is a wide 
difference among children in the measure of their 
timidity in the presence of personal danger, no one 
will deny. 

One child inclines to be unduly cautious, while 
another inclines to be unduly venturesome. More- 
over, that the timidest child can be brought to 
overcome, in large measure, his fears of physical 
harm, is apparent in view of the success of primi- 



228 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

tive peoples in training their children to swim be- 
fore they can walk, or to climb as soon as they 
can stand ; and of circus managers in bringing the 
children of civilized parents to feats of daring 
agility. How to train a child to the mastery of 
his fears in this line, without the brutal disregard 
of his feelings that too often accompanies such 
training by savages or professional athletes, is a 
point worthy of the attention of every wise parent. 
Because these fears are within the realm of the 
reasoning faculties, they ought to be removed by 
means of a process of reasoning. A child ought 
not to be beaten or threatened or ridiculed into 
the overcoming of his fears, but rather encour- 
aged and directed to their overcoming, through 
showing him that they ought to, and that they 
can, be overcome. His fears are not unworthy of 
him ; therefore he ought neither to be punished 
nor to be made sport of because he has them. 
The meeting and surmounting of his fears, within 
bounds, is also worthy of a child ; therefore he 
ought to be helped to see this fact, and kindly 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 229 

cheered and sympathized with in his efforts ac- 
cordingly. 

Many a child has been trained to intelligent 
fearlessness, so far as he ought to be fearless, 
through the wise and tender endeavors of his 
parents to show him his power in this direction, 
and to stimulate him to the exercise of this power. 
And many a child has been turned aside from the 
overcoming of his fears, through the untimely 
ridicule of him for his possession of those fears. 
Because he must be a laughing-stock while strug- 
gling to master his fears, he decides to evade the 
struggle in order to evade the ridicule. Tender- 
ness in pointing out to a child the wiser way of 
meeting his fears, is better than severity on the 
one hand, or ridicule on the other. 

Unreasoning or instinctive fears are common to 
both the brightest and the dullest children. They 
are among the guards which are granted to hu- 
manity, in its very nature, for its own protection. 
It would never do for a child to make no distinction 
between persons whom he could trust implicitly, 



230 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

and persons whom he must suspect, or shrink 
from. It is right that he should be won or repelled 
by differences in form and expression. He needs 
to be capable of starting at a sudden sound, and of 
standing in awe of the great forces of nature. The 
proper meeting of these instinctive fears by a child 
must be through his understanding of their reason- 
able limits, and through the intelligent conforming 
of his action to that understanding. It is for the 
parent to train his child to know how far he must 
overcome these fears, and how far they must still 
have play in his mind. And this is a process re- 
quiring tenderness, patience, and wisdom. 

When a child shows fear at the moaning of the 
wind about the house, and at its rattling of the 
shutters on a winter's night, it is not fair to say to 
him, "Oh, nonsense! What are you afraid of? 
That's nothing but the wind." There is no help 
to the child in that saying; but there is harm to 
him in its suggestion of the parent's lack of sym- 
pathy with him. If, however, the parent says, at 
such a time, " Does that sound trouble you ? Let 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 23 1 

me tell you how it comes ; " and then goes on to 
show how the wind is doincr God's work in driving 
away causes of sickness, and how it sometimes 
makes sweet music on wires that are stretched out 
for it to play upon, — the child may come to have 
a new thought about the wind, and to listen for 
its changing sounds on the shutters or through 
the trees. 

One good mother sought to overcome her little 
boy's fear of thunder by simply telling him that it 
was God's voice speaking out of the heavens ; but 
that was one step too many for his thoughts to take 
as yet. The thunder just as it was, was what gave 
him trouble, no matter where it came from; so 
when the next peal sounded through the air, the 
little fellow whimpered out despairingly, " Mamma, 
baby doesn't like God's voice." And that mother 
was too wise and tender to rebuke her child for his 
unreadiness for that mode of revelation from above. 

On the other hand, an equally wise and tender 
father, whose little daughter was afraid of the 
thunder, took his child into his arms, when a 



232 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

thunder-storm was raging, and carried her out on 
to the piazza, in order, as he said, to show her 
something very beautiful. Then he told her that 
the clouds were making loud music, and that the 
light always flashed from the clouds before the 
music sounded, and he wanted her to watch for 
both light and music. His evident enthusiasm on 
the subject, and his manifest tenderness toward his 
child, swept the little one away from her fears, out 
toward the wonders of nature above her ; and soon 
she was ready to believe that the thunder was as 
the very voice of God, which she could listen to 
with reverent gratitude. If there were more of 
such loving wisdom exercised in parental dealing 
with children's fears, there would be less trouble 
from the unmastered fears of children on every side. 
The hardest fears to control are, however, the 
fears which are purely of the imagination ; and no 
other fears call for such considerate tenderness 
of treatment as these, in the realm of child-train- 
ing. It is the more sensitive children, children 
of the finest grain, and of the more active and 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 233 

potent imaginings, who are most liable to the 
sway of these fears, and who are sure to suffer 
most from them. Persons who are lacking in the 
imaginative faculty, or who are cold-blooded and 
matter-of-fact in their temperament and nature, 
are hardly able to comprehend the power of these 
fears over those wHo feel them at their fullest. 
Hence it is that these fears in a child's mind are 
less likely than any others to receive due con- 
sideration from parents generally, even while they 
need it most. 

Because these fears are not of the reason, they 
are not to be removed by reason. Because they 
are of the imagination, the imagination must be 
called into service for their mastery. It is not 
enough to pronounce these fears unreasonable and 
foolish. They are, in their realm, a reality, and 
they must be met accordingly. While children 
suffer from them most keenly, they are not always 
outgrown in manhood. A clergyman already past 
the middle of life was heard to say that, to this 
day, he could never come up the cellar stairs all 



234 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

by himself, late at night, after covering up the fur- 
nace fire for the night, without the irrational fear 
that some one would clutch him by his feet from 
out of the darkness below. The fear was a reality, 
even though the cause was in the imagination. 
And a soldier who had been under fire in a score 
of battles, said that he would to-day rather go into 
another battle than to be all alone in a deserted 
house in broad daylight. 

In neither of these cases was the person under 
the influence of superstitious fears, but only of 
those fears which an active imagination will sug- 
gest in connection with possibilities of danger be- 
yond all that can yet be seen. And these are but 
illustrations of the sway of such fears in the minds 
of men who are stronger by reason of their very 
susceptibility to such fears. These men have added 
power because of their vivid imaginations ; and 
because of their vivid imaginations they are liable 
to fears of this sort. What folly, then, to blame a 
child of high imagination for feeling the sway of 
similar fears! 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 235 

The heroic treatment of these fears of the imagi- 
nation is not what is called for in every instance; 
nor is it always sufficient to meet the case. A 
child may be trained to go by himself into the 
darkness, or to sleep in a room shut away from 
other occupants of the house, without overcoming 
his fears of imagination. And if these fears be 
constantly spoken of as those which are utterly 
unworthy of him, the child may indeed refrain 
from giving expression to them, and suffer all by 
himself with an uncalled-for sense of humiliation, 
even while he is just as timid as before. It would 
be better, in many a case, to refrain from an undue 
strain on a sensitive child, through sending him 
out of the house in the evening to walk a lonely 
path, or through forcing him to sleep beyond the 
easy call of other members of the household ; but 
in every instance it is right and wise for a parent 
to give his child the evidence of sympathy with 
him in his fears, and of tender considerateness of 
him in his struggles for their overcoming. 

The help of helps to a child in meeting his fears 



236 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

of the imagination, is found in the bringing to his 
mind, through the imagination, a sense of the con- 
stant presence of a Divine Protector to cheer him 
when his fears are at their highest. A Httle child 
who wakened in the middle of the night, called to 
her parents, in another room, and when her father 
was by her bedside, she told him that she was 
afraid to be alone. Instead of rebuking her for 
this, he said, " There's a little verse in the Bible, 
my darling, that's meant for you at a time like this ; 
and I want you to have that in your mind when- 
ever you waken in this way. It is a verse out of 
one of David's psalms ; and it is what he said to 
the Lord his Shepherd: 'What time I am afraid, I 
will trust in thee.' That is the verse. Now, when- 
ever you are afraid, you can think of that verse, 
and say it over as a loving prayer, and the Good 
Shepherd will hear you, and will keep you from 
all harm." 

The child repeated the verse after her father, and 
she saw its peculiar fitness to her case. As her 
father then prayed to the God of David in loving 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 237 

confidence, she realized more fully than before how- 
near God was to her in the time of her greatest 
fears. And from that time on, that little child was 
comforted through faith when her imagination 
pressed her with its terrors. She never forgot that 
verse ; and it still is a help to her in her fears by 
day and by night. 

A child's imagination ought, indeed, to be 
guarded sacredly. It should be shielded as far 
as possible from unnecessary fears, through foolish 
stories of ghosts and witches, told by nurses or 
companions, or read from improper books. But 
whether a child's fears in this realm be few or 
many, they should be dealt wiuh tenderly by a 
loving parent ; not ignored, nor rudely overborne. 
Many a child has been harmed for life through a 
thoughtless disregard by his parents of the fears of 
his imagination. But every child might be helped 
for life by a sympathetic and tender treatment of 
these fears, on the part of his parents, while he is 
still under their training. 

In no realm of a child's nature has a child 



238 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

greater need of sympathy and tenderness from 
his parents, than in the realm of his fears. It is 
because he is sensitive, and in proportion as he is 
sensitive, that a child's fears have any hold upon 
him. And a child's sensitiveness is too sacred to 
be treated rudely or with lightness by those to 
whom he is dearest, and who would fain train him 
wisely and well. 



XXIV. 

THE SORROWS OF CHILDREN, 



The trials and sorrows of children ana young 
people have not always had the recognition they 
deserve from parents and teachers. It is even cus- 
tomary to speak of childhood as an age of utter 
freedom from anxiety and grief, and to look upon 
boys and girls generally as happier and lighter- 
hearted than they can hope to be in later life. No 
mistake could be greater than this. The darker 
side of life is seen first. The brighter side comes 
afterward. 

" Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly up- 
ward." The first sound of a child's voice is a cry, 
and that cry is many times repeated before the 
child gives his first smile. How easily the best- 
behaved baby cries, every mother can testify. It is 
the soothing of a crying child, not the sharing in 

239 



240 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

the joy of a laughing one, which taxes the skill 
and the patience of a faithful nurse. Only as the 
child is trained, disciplined, to overcome his incli- 
nation to cry, and to find happiness in his sphere, 
does he come to be a joyous and glad-hearted 
little one. 

Every burden of life — and life's burdens seem 
many — rests at its heaviest on a child's nature. 
A child is refused more requests than are granted 
to him. He is subjected to disappointments daily, 
almost hourly. The baby cannot reach the moon, 
nor handle papa's razor, nor pound the looking- 
glass, nor pull over the tea-pot, nor creep into the 
fire. The older child cannot eat everything he 
wants to, nor go out at all times, nor have papa 
and mamma ever at his side. Then there come 
school-tasks to shrink from, and the jealousies and 
unkindnesses of playmates and companions to 
grieve over. And as more is known of life and 
the world, and the inevitable struggles with tempta- 
tion, and of the injustice and wrongs which must in 
so many instances be suffered, it becomes harder and 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 241 

harder for a young person to see only the brighter 
side of human existence, and to bear up bravely 
and cheerily under all that tends to sadden and 
oppress us. There are more clouds in the sky of 
life's April than of life's August. 

As the young grow older they come to be less 
sensitive to little trials, and they control themselves 
better. They are not tempted to shed tears when- 
ever they find their plans thwarted, or themselves 
unable to do or to have all they would like to, or 
their companions unlike Avhat they had hoped for. 
They learn to philosophize over their troubles, to 
look at the compensations of life, and to recognize 
the fact that many things which they have' longed 
after would not have been good for them if they 
had obtained them, and that, at all events, time will 
soften many of their trials. And so life's troubles 
seem lighter, and life's joys greater — if not more 
intense — to maturer minds than to the young. 
Even when men are far greater sufferers than ever 
children can be, they come to be calloused in a 

measure through the very continuance of their 

16 



242 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

grief, and they bear as a little thing that which 
would have crushed them a few years before. 

But how their former experiences and their 
earlier tumults of feeling are forgotten by men 
and women as they get farther and farther away 
from childhood! They fail to remember how 
deeply they grieved as little ones. They forget, 
in large measure, how heavy the burdens of life 
seemed in their earlier years. They are sure that 
many things which now trouble them had no 
power over them when they were younger. It 
seems to them, indeed, that the little trials of chil- 
dren cannot seem very large even to children. 
And so, as they watch the little ones in their 
brighter moments, they think that childhood is the 
age of freedom from sorrow and care; and they 
are even inclined to wish that they Avere young 
once more, that they might have no such hours of 
trial and grief as now they are called to so 
frequently. 

Values are relative; so are losses; so are sor- 
rows. One person puts a high estimate on what 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 243 

another deems quite worthless. One grieves over a 
loss for which another would feel no concern. 
That which a child values highly may be of no 
moment to the child's father ; but its loss might be 
as great a grief to the child as would the loss to 
the father of that which, in the father's sight, is 
incalculably more important. The breaking of a 
valued toy may b^ as serious a disaster, from the 
child's point of view, as the bankrupting of the 
father's business would seem from the father's 
standpoint. And the child's temporary censure by 
his playmates for some slight misdoing of his, may 
cause to him as bitter a sorrow as would the con- 
demnation by the public, cause to his father when 
the father's course had brought him into permanent 
disgrace. 

A little girl was startled by what she heard said 
at the family table concerning a neighbor's loss 
of household silver through a visit of robbers. 
" Mamma," she whispered, " do robbers take 
dolls f Her dolls were that child's treasure. If 
tiicy were in danger, life had new terrors for her. 



244 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

" No, my dear," said her mamma ; " robbers don't 
want dolls. Why should they take them?" "I 
didn't know but they would want them for their 
little girls," was the answer; as showing that, in 
the child's estimation, dolls had a value for children 
in the homes of robbers as well as elsewhere. 
With the assurance that her dolls were safe, that 
little girl had less fear of midnight robberies. 
What, to her mind, was the loss of the family sil- 
ver, or of clothing and jewels, if the dolls were to 
be left unharmed ! A child's estimate of values 
may be a false one; but the child's sorrows over 
losses measured by those estimates are as real as 
any one's sorrows. 

It must, indeed, be a sore pressure of sorrow and 
trial on a child's mind and heart, to bring him to 
commit suicide ; yet the suicide of a child is by no 
means so rare an act as many would suppose. The 
annual official statistics of suicides in France show 
a 'considerable percentage of children among the 
unhappy victims. Hundreds of suicides are re- 
ported in England, year by year. In America the 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 245 

case is much the same. Month by month the 
pubHc prints give the details of child suicides as a 
result of some sore trial or sorrow to the little ones. 

" Forgive me for committing suicide," wrote a 
bright and affectionate lad, in a note to his father 
just before committing the fatal act. " I am tired 
of life," he added. And everything in connection 
with his suicide showed that that lad had planned 
the act with a cool head and an aching heart. 
In fact, most persons of adult years can recall 
out of the memories of their earlier life some ex- 
periences of disappointment, or of grief, or of a 
sense of injustice, which made life seem to them 
for the time being no longer worth living, and the 
thought of an end to their trial in death not wholly 
terrible. Very childish all this was, of course ; but 
that is the point of its lesson to parents; childish 
griefs are very real and very trying — to children. 

One plain teaching of these facts concerning the 
sorrows of children is, that the young need the 
comfort and joys of a Christian faith for the life 
that now is, quite as surely as the aged need a 



246 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

Christian hope for the Hfe that is to come. The 
surest way of bringing even a child to see the 
brighter side of this hfe is by inducing him to 
put his trust in an omnipotent Saviour, who loves 
him, and who makes all things work together for 
good to him if only he trust himself to His care 
and walks faithfully in His service. The invita- 
tions and the promises of the Bible are just what 
children need, to give them happiness and hope 
for now and for hereafter. 



XXV. 

THE PLACE OF SYMPATHY IN 
CmLD-TRAINING. 



A child needs sympathy hardly less than he 

needs love; yet ten children are loved by their 

parents where one child has his parents' sympathy. 

Every parent will admit that love for his children 

is a duty ; but only now and then is there a parent 

who realizes that he ought to have sympathy with 

his children. In fact, it may safely be. said that, 

among those children who are not called to suffer 

from actual unkindness on the part of their parents, 

there is no greater cause of unhappiness than the 

lack of parental sympathy. And, on the other 

hand, it is unquestionably true that in no way can 

any parent gain such power over his child for the 

shaping of the child's character and habits of life as 

• by having and showing sympathy with that child. 

247 



248 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

Love may be all on one side. It may be given 
without being returned or appreciated. It may 
fail of influencing or affecting the one toward 
whom it goes out. But sympathy is in its very 
nature a twofold force. It cannot be all on one 
side. From its start it is a response to another's 
feelings or needs. It is based on the affections, or 
inclinations, or sufferings, or sense of lack, already 
experienced by another. Hence sympathy is sure 
of a grateful recognition by the one who has called 
it out. Love may be proffered before it is asked 
for or desired. Sympathy is in itself the answer to 
a call for that which it represents. Love may, in- 
deed, be unwelcome. Sympathy is, in advance, 
assured of a welcome. 

In his joys as in his sorrows a true child wants 
some one to share his feelings rather than to guide 
them. If he has fallen and hurt himself, a child 
is more helped by being spoken to in evident sym- 
pathy than by being told that he must not cry, or 
that his hurt is a very trifling matter. The love 
that shows itself in tenderly binding up his wound, ' 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 249 

in a case like this, has less hold upon the child 
than the sympathy that expresses a full sense of 
his pain, and that recognizes and commends his 
struggle to control his feelings under his injury. 
It is easier, indeed, to comfort a child at such a 
time, and to give him power over himself, by show- 
ing him that you feel with him, and how you want 
him to feel, than by telling him, never so lovingly, 
what he ought to do, and how to do it. And it is 
the same with a child in any time of joy, as in 
every time of grief He wants your sympathy 
with him in his delights, rather than your loving 
approval of his enjoying himself just then and 
in that way. 

Herbert Spencer, who makes as little of the finer 
sentiments of human nature as any intelligent ob- 
server of children can safely do, emphasizes this 
desire of a child for sympathy, in the realm of 
mental development. "What can be more mani- 
fest," he asks, ''than the desire of children for 
intellectual sympathy? Mark how the infant sit- 
ting on your knee thrusts into your face the toy it 



250 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

holds, that you too may look at it. See, when it 
makes a creak with its wet finger on the table, 
how it turns and looks at you; does it again, and 
again looks at you ; thus saying as clearly as it 
can — ' Hear this new sound.' Watch how the 
older children come into the room exclaiming, 
* Mamma, see what a curious thing,' * Mamma, look 
at this,' ' Mamma, look at that ; * and would con- 
tinue the habit, did not the silly mamma tell them 
not to tease her. Observe how, when out with 
the nurse-maid, each little one runs up to her with 
the new flower it has gathered, to show her how 
pretty it is, and to get her also to say it is pretty. 
Listen to the eager volubility with which every 
urchin describes any novelty he has been to see, 
if only he can find some one who will attend 
with any interest." 

How many parents there are, however, who are 
readier to provide playthings for their children 
than to share the delights of their children with 
those playthings; readier to set their children at 
knowledge-seeking, than to have a part in their 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 2 5 I 

children's surprises and enjoyments of knowledge- 
attaining; readier to make good, as far as they can, 
all losses to their children, than to grieve with their 
children over those losses. And what a loss of 
power to those parents as parents, is this lack of 
sympathy with their children as children. There 
are, however, parents who sympathize with their 
children in all things ; and as a result, they practi- 
cally train and sway their children as they will : 
for when there is entire sympathy between two 
persons, the stronger one is necessarily the con- 
trolling force with both. 

In order to sympathize with another, you must 
be able to put yourself in his place, mentally and 
emotionally; to occupy, for the time being, his 
point of view, and to see that which he sees, and 
as he sees it, as he looks out thence. It is not 
that your way of looking at it is his way from 
the start, but it is that his way of looking at it 
must be your way while you are taking your start 
in an effort to show your sympathy with him. In 
many relations of life, sympathy would be impossi- 



252 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

ble between two parties, because of the differences 
of taste and temperament and habits of thought; 
but in the case of parent and child, the parent 
ought to be able to learn the child's ways of 
thinking and modes of feeling, so as to come 
into the possibility of sympathy with the child 
at all times. 

How the child ought to feel is one thing. How 
the child does feel is quite another thing. The 
parent may know the former better than the child 
does; but the latter the child knows better than 
the parent. Until a parent has learned just how 
the child looks at any matter, the parent is incapa- 
ble of so coming alongside of the child in his esti- 
mate of that matter as to win his confidence and 
to work with him toward a more correct view of 
it. To stand off apart from the child, and tell him 
how he ought to think and feel, may be a means 
of disheartening him, as he finds himself so far 
from the correct standard. But to stand with the 
child and point him to the course he ought to 
pursue, is more likely to inspire him to honest 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 253 

efforts in that direction, until he comes to think 
and to feel as his parents would have him. 

A parent misses an opportunity of gaining added 
power over his child, when he fails to show sympa- 
thy with that child in the child's enjoyments and 
ordinary occupations. If, indeed, the parent would 
be always ready to evidence an interest in his 
child's plays and companionships and studies, the 
parent would grow into the very life of his child in 
all these spheres ; and there would be hardly less 
delight to the child in talking those things over 
with his parent afterward, than in going through 
with them originally. But if the parent seems to 
have no share with the child in any one or all of 
these lines of childhood experience, the child is 
necessarily shut away so far from his parent, and 
compelled to live his life there as if he were 
parentless. 

Still more does a parent lose of opportunity for 
good to his child, if he fails to have sympathy with 
his child in that child's weaknesses and follies and 
misdoings. It is in every child's nature to long 



254 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

for sympathy at the point where he needs it most; 
and when he has done wrong, or has indulged evil 
thoughts, or is feeling the force of temptation, he 
is glad to turn to some one stronger and better 
than himself, and make confession of his faults and 
failures. If, as he comes to his parents at such a 
time, he is met with manifest sympathy, he is 
drawn to his parents with new confidence and new 
trust. But if he is met unsympathetically, and is 
simply told how wrong he is, or how strange it 
seems that he should be so far astray, he is turned 
back upon himself to meet his bitterest life-strug- 
gle all by himself; and a new barrier is reared 
between him and his parents, that no parental love 
can remove, and that no parental watchfulness or 
care can make a blessing to either child or parent. 
It is a great thing for a parent to have such 
sympathy with his child that his child can tell him 
freely of his worst thoughts or his greatest fail- 
ures without any fear of seeming to shock that 
parent, and so to chill the child's confidence. It is 
a great thing for a parent to have such sympa- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 255 

thetic thoughts of his child when that child has 
unintentionally broken some fragile keepsake pecu- 
liarly dear to the parent, as to be more moved by 
regret for the child's sorrow over the mishap than 
for the loss of the precious relic. There is no such 
power over children as comes from such sympathy 
with children. 

There is truth in the suggestion of Herbert 
Spencer, that too often '* mothers and fathers are 
mostly considered by their offspring as friend-ene- 
mies ; " and that it is much better for parents to 
show to their children that they are "their best 
friends," than to content themselves with saying so. 
It ought to be so, that children would feel that 
they could find no such appreciative sympathy 
from any other person, in their enjoyments or in 
their sorrows and trials, as they are sure of from 
their parents. This is so in some cases ; and 
wherever it is so, the parents have such power 
over and with their children as would otherwise be 
impossible. On the other hand, there are parents 
who love their children without stint, and who 



256 HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

would die to promote their welfare, who actually 
have no sympathy with their children, and who, 
because of this lack of sympathy, are without 
the freest confidences of their children, and are 
unable to sway them as they fain would. 

The power of sympathy is not wholly a natural 
one. It is largely dependent upon cultivation. An 
unsympathetic parent may persistently train him- 
self to a habit of sympathy with an unsympa- 
thetic child, by recognizing his duty of learning 
how the child thinks and feels, and by perceiv- 
ing the gain of getting alongside of that child 
in loving tenderness in order to bring him to a 
better way of thinking and feeling. But if a 
parent and child are not in sympathy, the best 
and most unselfish love that that parent can give 
to that child will be fruitless for such results in 
child-training as would be possible if that love 
were directed by sympathy. 



XXVI. 

INFLUENCE OF THE HOME 
ATMOSPHERE. 



In 'the world of nature, life is dependent on the 
atmosphere. Whatever else is secured, the atmos- 
phere is essential to life's existence. It is, in fact, 
the atmosphere that gives the possibility of all the 
varied forms of vegetable and animal life in the 
earth and the sea and the air. So, again, the at- 
mosphere brings death to every living thing, if 
elements that are hostile to life prevail in its com- 
position. When the question of the date of man's 
first appearance on our planet is under discussion, 
a chief factor in the unsolved problem is the nature 
of the atmosphere of the earth at any given period 
of antiquity. Without a life-sustaining atmosphere, 
life were an impossibility. Similarly, the question 

of the probability of other planets being inhabited, 

17 257 



258 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 



pivots on this consideration. Life and death are 
in the atmosphere. 

It is not alone the component elements of the 
atmosphere that bring life or death to all within its 
scope; but the temperature and the measure of 
movement of the atmosphere go far to decide the 
degree of life that shall be attained or preserved 
within the scope of its influence. Unless there is 
a due measure of oxygen in the air, the atmosphere 
is death-giving. Without sufficient warmth to the 
air, its oxygen is of no avail for the sustaining of 
life. And even though the oxygen and the warmth 
be present, the force of the swift-moving air may 
carry death on its vigorous wings. No gardener 
would depreciate the importance of a right atmos- 
phere for his most highly prized plants; nor would 
any wise physician undervalue the sanitary impor- 
tance of the atmospheric surroundings of his pa- 
tients. As it is in the natural world, so it is in the 
moral sphere : life and death are in the atmosphere, 

A vital question in connection with every home 
is, Is the atmosphere of this home suited to the 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 2 $9 

life and growth, to the developing of the vigor and 
beauty, of a child's best nature ? That question 
cannot always be answered in the affirmative ; and 
where it cannot be, it is of little use to talk of the 
minor training agencies which are operative in be- 
half of the children in that home. 

The atmosphere of a home is the spirit of that 
home, as evidenced in the conduct and bearing of 
the parents, and of all whom the parents influence. 
The atmosphere itself — there, as in all the natural 
world — is not seen, but is felt. Its effects are 
clearly observable ; but as a cause it is inferred 
rather than disclosed. Indeed, the better the at- 
mosphere in a home, the more quietly pervasive its 
influence. Only as the home atmosphere is inimi- 
cal to the best interests of those who feel its 
power, does that atmosphere make itself manifest 
as an atmosphere, rather than give proof of its 
existence in results that cannot otherwise be ac- 
counted for. 

You enter one home, and, mingling with the 
family there, you feel the balmy air of love and 



26o HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

sympathy. Parents and children seem to live for 
one another, and to be in complete accord in all 
their enjoyments and occupations ; and all is rest- 
ful in the peace that abides there. You are sure 
that everything in the moral and social atmosphere 
of that home tends to the fostering and growth of 
whatever is best in the child-nature. It is obvious 
that it is easier for a child to be good, and to do 
well, in such a home as that, than in. many another 
home. 

You enter another home, and the chill of the 
household air strikes you unpleasantly, at the first 
greeting given to you by any member of the family. 
There is a side of the child-nature that you know 
needs more warmth than that for its developing. 
■Again it is the burning heat of an excited and 
ever-driving household life that you are confident 
is withering the more delicate and sensitive tendrils 
of the young hearts being trained there. Yet 
again, it is the explosive storm-bursts of passion 
which tear through, the air, that make a home a 
place of peril to the young for the time being, 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 261 

however it may seem in the lulls between tem- 
pests. In the one case as in the others, it is the 
home atmosphere that settles the question of the 
final tendency of the home training. 

In view of the importance of the home atmos- 
phere, parents ought to recognize their responsi- 
bility for the atmosphere of the home they make 
and control. It is not enough for parents to have 
a lofty ideal for their children, and to instruct and 
train those children in the direction of that ideal. 
They must see to it that the atmosphere of their 
home is such as to foster and develop in their chil- 
dren those traits of character which their loftiest 
ideal embodies. That atmosphere must be full of 
the pure oxygen of love to God and love to man. 
It must be neither too hot in its intensity of social 
activities, nor too cold in its expressions of family 
affection, but balmy and refreshing in its uniform 
temperature of household living and being. It 
must be gentle and peaceful in its manner and 
movement of sympathetic intercourse. All this it 
may be. All this it ought to be. 



262 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

Every home has its atmosphere, good or bad, 
health-promoting or disease-breeding. And parents 
are, in every case, directly responsible for the na- 
ture of the atmosphere in their home ; whether 
they have acted in recognition of this fact, or have 
gone on without a thought of it. In order to secure 
a right home atmosphere for their children, par- 
ents must themselves be right. They must guard 
against poisoning the air of the home with unlov- 
ing words or thoughts; against chilling it with 
unsympathetic manners, or overheating it with ex- 
citing ways ; against disturbing its peaceful flow 
with restlessness, with fault-findings, or with bursts 
of temper. 

Parents must, as it were, keep their eyes on the 
barometer and the thermometer of the social life 
of the home, and see to it that its temperature is 
safely moderated, and that it is guarded against the 
effect of sudden storms. Only as such care is 
taken by wise parents, can the atmosphere in their 
home be what the needs of their children require 
it to be. 



XXVII. 
THE POWER OF A MOTHERS LOVE. 



In estimating the agencies which combine for 
child-shaping through child-training, the pov\ er of 
a mother's love cannot be overestimated. There 
is no human love like a mother's love. There is 
no human tenderness like a mother's tenderness. 
And there is no such time for a mother's impres- 
sive display of her love and tenderness toward her 
child as in the child's earliest years of his life. 
That time neglected, and no future can make good 
the loss to either mother or child. That time im- 
proved, and all the years that follow it shall give 
added proof of its improvement. 

Even when a man seems to be dead to every 

other influence for good, the recollection of a 

mother's prayers and a mother's tears often has a 

hold upon him which he neither can nor would 

263 



264 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

break away from. An^ a mother is so much to a 
man when he is a man, just because she was all in 
all to him when he was a child. 

Although God calls himself our Father, he com- 
pares his love with the love of a mother, when he 
would disclose to us the depth of its tenderness, 
and its matchless fidelity. "As one whom his 
mother comforteth, so will I comfort you," he says, 
as if in invitation to the sinner to come like a 
grieved and tired child, and lay down his weary 
head on his mother's shoulder, where he is sure of 
rest and sympathy, and of words of comfort and 
cheer. "Can a woman forget her nursing child, 
that she should not have compassion on the son of 
her womb?" asks God, as if to turn attention to 
that which is truest and firmest of anything we can 
know of human affection and fidelity. And then 
to show that he is a yet surer support than even 
mothers prove to their loved children, he adds, 
" Yea, they may forget, yet will not I forget 
thee." 

David, the man after God's own heart, could find 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 265 

no words which could express his abiding confi- 
dence in God, Hke those wherein he declares, 
"When my father and my mother forsake me, 
then the Lord will take me up." Nor could he 
find any figure of the profoundest depth of human 
sorrow more forcible than that in which he says 
of himself, "I bowed down heavily, as one that 
mourneth for his mother." When David's greater 
Son was hanging on the cross in agony, with the 
weight of a lost world upon him, he could forget 
all his personal suffering, and could turn, as it 
were, for a moment, from the work of eternal re- 
demption, to recognize the tenderness and fidelity 
of his agonized mother at his feet, and to commend 
her with his dying breath to the faithful ministry 
of the disciple whom he loved. 

The Bible abounds with pictures of loving 
mothers and of a mother's love, — Hagar, weeping 
in the desert over her famishing boy; Rachel 
mourning for her children, refusing to be comforted 
because they were not; Jochebed playing the 
servant to secure the privilege of nursing her babe 



266 HINTS OA CHILD-TRAINING. 

for the daughter of Pharaoh ; Hannah joying be- 
fore God over her treasure of a longed-for son; 
the true mother in the presence of Solomon, ready 
to lose her child that it might be saved; Rizpah, 
watching on the hill-top the hanging bodies of her 
murdered sons, month after month, from the begin- 
ning of harvest until the autumn rains, suffering 
"neither the birds of the air to rest on them by 
day, nor the beasts of the field by night ; " the wife 
of Jeroboam, longing to be at the bedside of her 
dying son, and torn at heart with the thought that 
as soon as she should reach him there he must 
die ; the widow of Zarephath, and the Shunammite 
woman, securing the intercession of the prophet 
for the restoration to life of their dead darlings ; 
the mother of James and John pleading with Jesus 
for favors to her sons ; the Syro-Phoenician woman 
venturing everything, and refusing to be put aside, 
that she might win a blessing from Him who alone 
was able to restore to health and freedom her 
grievously vexed daughter; the mother of Tim- 
othy, teaching her son lessons by which the world 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 267 

is still profiting ; and so on through a long list of 
those who were representative mothers, chosen of 
God for a place in the sacred record, and w^hose 
like are about us still on every side. 

And the Bible injunctions concerning mothers 
are as positive as the examples of their loving 
ministry are numerous. "Honor thy father and 
thy mother" is a commandment which has pre- 
eminence in the reward attached to it. " Forsake 
not the law of thy mother," said Solomon ; " and 
despise not thy mother when she is old." It is 
indeed a "foolish man," as w^ell as an unnatural 
one, who " despiseth his mother," or w^ho fails to 
give her gratitude and love so long as she is spared 
to him. In all ages and everywhere, the true chil- 
dren of a true mother " rise up and call her 
blessed ; " for they realize, sooner or later, that God 
'gives no richer blessing to man than is found in a 
mother's love. Even in the days when a queen- 
wife was a slave, a queen-mother was looked up to 
with reverence, not because she had been a queen, 
but because she was still the king's mother. "A 



268 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

mother dead! " wrote gruff and tenderhearted Car- 
lyle. "It is an epoch for us all; and to each one 
of us it comes with a pungency as if peculiar, a 
look as of originality and singularity." And it 
was of the mother whose death called out this 
ejaculation, of whom, while she was still living, 
Carlyle had written, '* I thought, if I had all the 
mothers I ever saw to choose from, I would have 
chosen my own." 

A mother can never be replaced. She will be 
missed and mourned when she has passed away, 
however she may be undervalued by the " foolish 
son " to whom she still gives the wealth of her 
unappreciated affection. Indeed, the true man 
never, while his mother is alive, outgrows a certain 
sense of dependence on a loving mother's sym- 
pathy and care. His hair may be whitened with 
age; he may have children, and even grandchil- 
dren, looking up to him in respect and affec- 
tion; but while his mother lives she is his mother, 
and he is her boy. And when she dies he for 
the first time realizes the desolateness of a mother- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 269 

less son. There is then no one on earth to whom 
he can look up with the never-doubting confidence 
and the never-lacking restfulness of a tired child 
to a loving mother. There is a shelter taken away 
from above his head, and he seems to stand unpro- 
tected, as never before, from the smiting sun and 
the driving storms of life's pilgrimage. He can 
no more be called " My dear son " in those tones 
which no music of earth can equal. To him 

always : 

"A mother is a mother still, 
The holiest thing alive." 

Biography is rich with illustrations of this truth, 
although the man whose mother is still spared 
to him need not go beyond his own experience 
to recognize its force. Here, for example, is testy 
old Dr. Johnson, bearish and boorish in many 
things. When he is fifty years old, and his mother 
is ninety, he writes to her in tenderness: "You 
have been the best mother, and, I believe, the best 
woman, in the world. I thank you for your indul- 
gence to me, and beg forgiveness of all that I have 



l-JO HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

done ill, and of all that I have omitted to do well." 
How many men there are whom the world little 
thinks of as child-like, who could make these words 
their own, and set their hands to them with John- 
son's closing assurance, "I am, dear, dear mother, 
your dutiful son." And the lion-hearted Luther, 
who seems better suited to thunder defiance at 
spiritual oppressors than to speak words of trustful 
affection to a kind-hearted woman, turns from his 
religious warfare to write to his aged and dying 
mother : " I am deeply sorrowful that I cannot be 
with you in the flesh, as I fain would be." "All 
your children pray for you." 

St. Augustine has been called the most important 
convert to the truth from St. Paul to Luther. Near 
the close of his eventful life, St. Augustine said: 
" It is to my mother that I owe everything. If I 
am thy child, O my God! it is because thou gavest 
me such a mother. If I prefer the truth to all 
things, it is the fruit of my mother's teachings. If 
I did not long ago perish in sin and misery, it is 
because of the long and faithful years which she 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 27 1 

pleaded for me." And of his mother's remem- 
bered devotedness to him, he said at the time of 
her death : " O my God ! what comparison is there 
between the honor that I paid to her, and her 
slavery for me ? " 

John Quincy Adams's mother lived to be seventy- 
four; but he had not outgrown his sense of per- 
sonal dependence upon her, when she was taken 
away. "My mother was an angel upon earth," he 
wrote. " She was the real personification of female 
virtue, of piety, of charity, of ever-active and never- 
intermitting benevolence. O God ! could she have 
been spared yet a little longer!" "I have enjoyed 
but for short seasons, and at long, distant intervals,, 
the happiness of her society, yet she has been to 
me more than a mother. She has been a spirit 
from above watching over me for good, and con- 
tributing, by my mere consciousness of her exist- 
ence, to the comfort of my life. That conscious- 
ness has gone, and without her the world feels to 
me like a solitude." When President Nott, of 
Union College, was more than ninety years old, 



273 HINTS ON CHILD 'TRAINING. 

and had been for half a century a college president, 
as strength and sense failed him in his dying hours, 
the memory of his mother's love was fresh and 
potent, and he could be hushed to needed sleep by 
patting him gently on the shoulder, and singing to 
him the familiar lullabies of long ago, after the 
fashion of that mother, who he fancied was still at 
hand to care for him. ♦ 

Lord Macaulay has been called a cold-hearted 
man, but he was never unmindful of the unique 
preciousness of a mother's love. He it was who 
said : " In after life you may have friends, fond, 
dear, kind friends, but never will you have again 
the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished 
upon you which a mother bestows. Often do I 
sigh, in my struggles with the hard, uncaring 
world, for the sweet deep security I felt when, of 
an evening, nestling in her bosom, I listened to 
some quiet tale, suitable to my age, read in her 
untiring voice. Never can I forget her sweet 
glances cast upon me when I appeared asleep; 
never, her kiss of peace at night. Years have 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 273 

passed since we laid her beside my father in the 
old churchyard, yet still her voice whispers from 
the grave and her eye watches over me as I visit 
spots long since hallowed to the memory of my 
mother.'* 

Napoleon Bonaparte, with all his self-reliance 
and personal independence of character, never 
ceased to look up to his mother with a reverent 
affection, and he was accustomed to say that he 
owed all that he was, and all that he had, to her 
character and loving ministry. "Ah, what a woman ! 
where shall we look for her equal ? " he said of her. 
"She watched over us with a solicitude unex- 
ampled. Every low sentiment, every ungenerous 
affection, was discouraged and discarded. She 
suffered nothing but that which was grand and 
elevated to take root in our youthful understand- 
ings. . . . Losses, privations, fatigue, had no effect 
on her. She endured all, braved all. She had the 
energy of a man combined with the gentleness and 
delicacy of a woman." ^ 

When all else seemed lost to him, as he lay a 



274 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

lonely prisoner on the shores of St. Helena, Na- 
poleon was sure of one thing. " My mother loves 
me," he said ; and the thought of his mother's 
love was a comfort to him then. He who had felt 
able to rule a world unaided, was not above a 
sense of grateful dependence on a love like that. 
" My opinion is," he said, " that the future good 
or bad conduct of a child depends entirely upon 
its mother." 

A young army officer lay dying, at the close of 
our American civil war. He had been much away 
from home even before the war ; and now for four 
years he had been a soldier in active army service. 
On many a field of battle he had faced death fear- 
lessly, and in many an hour of privation and hard- 
ship he had been dependent on his own strength 
and resources. What could more have tended to 
wean a man from reliance on a mother's presence 
and sustaining care? The soldier's mind was wan- 
dering now. It was in the early morning, after a 
wakeful, restless night. Exciting scenes were evi- 
dently before his mind's eye. The enemy was 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 275 

pressing him sorely. He was anxious as to his 
position. He gave orders rapidly and with vehe- 
mence. His subordinates seemed to be failing 
him. Everything was apparently wrong. Just 
then the young officer's mother, who had come 
from the North to watch over him, entered the 
roam where he lay. As the door opened for her 
coming, he turned toward it his troubled face, as if 
expecting a new enemy to confront him. Instantly, 
as he saw who was there, his countenance changed, 
the look of anxiety passed away, the eye softened, 
the struggle of doubt and fear was at an end, and 
with a deep-drawn sigh of relief he said in a tone 
of restful confidence, " Ah, mother's come ! It's 
all right now ! " And the troubled veteran soldier 
was a soothed child again. 

Soldier, statesman, scholar, divine ; every man is 
a child to his mother, to the last ; and it is the best 
that is in a man that keeps him always in this 
child-likeness toward his loving mother. Were it 
not for the power of a mother's love, that best and 
truest side of a man's nature would never be de- 



2/6 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

veloped, for the man's good and for the mother's 
reward. It costs something to be a good mother ; 
but there is no reward which earth can give to be 
compared with that love which a faithful mother 
wins and holds from the son of her love. Oh ! if 
good mothers could only know how much they are 
doing for their children by their patient, long- 
suffering, gentle v/ays with them, and how sure 
these children are to see and feel this by and by, 
the saddest of them would be less sad and more 
hopeful, while toiling and enduring so faithfully, 
with perhaps apparently so slight a return. 



XXVIII. 

ALLOWING PLAY TO A CHILD S 
IMAGINATION. 



Imagination is a larger factor in the thoughts 
and feelings of a child than in the thoughts and 
feelings of an adult; and this truth needs to be 
recognized in all wise efforts at a child's training. 
The mind of a child is full of images which the 
child knows to be unreal, but which are none the 
less vivid and impressive for being unreal. It is 
often right, therefore, to allow play to a child's 
imagination, when it would not be right to permit 
the child to say, or to say to the child, that which 
is false. 

A child who is hardly old enough to speak per- 
ceives the difference between fact and fancy, and is 
able to see that the unreal is not always the false. 

Hence a very young child can understand that to 

277 



2/8 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

"make believe" to him is not to attempt to deceive 
him. A child in his mother's lap, who is not yet 
old enough to stand alone, is ready to pull at a 
string fastened to a chair in front of his mother's 
seat, and play that he is driving a horse. As he 
grows older, he will straddle a stick and call that ^ 
riding horseback ; telling his parent, perhaps, of 
the good long ride he is taking. Not only is it 
not a parent's duty to tell that child that the chair 
or the stick is not a horse, but it would be unfair, 
as well as unkind, to insist on that child's admis- 
sion that his possession of a horse is only in 
his fancy. 

The child is here not deceived to begin with; 
therefore, of course, he does not need to be un- 
deceived. Yet it would be wrong for the parent 
to permit his child to say, as if in reality, that he 
had been taken out to ride by his father, when 
nothing of the kind had happened. In the latter 
case the statement would be a false one, while in 
the former case it would be only a stretch of fancy. 
The child as well as the parent would have no 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 279 

difficulty in recognizing the difference between the 
two statements. 

A little girl will delight herself with setting a 
table with buttons for plates and cups, from which 
she will serve bread and cake and tea to her invited 
guests ; and she will be lovingly grateful for her 
mother's apparently hearty suggestion that *'this 
tea is of a fine flavor," when she would feel hurt if 
her mother were to tell her, coolly and cruelly, that 
it was only a dry button which had been passed as 
a cup of tea. The fancy in this case is truer by 
far than the fact. There is no deception in it ; but 
there is in it the power of an ideal reality. And it 
is by the dolls and other playthings of childhood 
that some of the truest instincts of manhood and 
of womanhood are developed and cultivated in the 
progress of all right child-training. 

It is in view of this distinction that the story of 
Santa Claus and Christmas Eve may be made one 
of reprehensible falsity, or one of allowable fancy. 
The underlying idea of Santa Claus is, that on 
the birth-night of the Holy Child Jesus there 



28o HJNTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 

comes a messenger from him to bring good gifts 
to children. So far the idea is truth. Just how 
the messenger from Jesus comes, and just who he 
is, are matters in the realm of fancy. The child is 
entitled to know the truth, and is entitled also to 
indulge in a measure of fancy. For a parent to 
take a child, the night before, and show him all 
the Christmas gifts arranged in a drawer as pre- 
paratory to the stocking-filling, leaving no room 
for the sweet indulgings of fancy, would neither be 
wise nor be kind. It would not accord with the 
God-given needs of the child's nature. Nor, again, 
would it be wise or kind for the parent to tell the 
full story of Santa Claus and his reindeers as if it 
were an absolute literal fact. Children have, in- 
deed, been frightened by the belief that Santa 
Claus would come down the chimney at night, 
and would refuse them presents if they were 
awake at his coming; and this is all wrong. The 
child should be taught the truth as the truth, 
and indulged in the fancy as fancy. 

It is, indeed, much the same in this realm as in 



HIXTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 28 1 

the Bible realm. To say that Jesus is the Good 
Shepherd is to present a truth in the guise of fancy ; 
and unless a child is helped to know the measure 
of truth and to perceive the sweep of fancy, there 
is a danger of trouble in using this Bible figure; 
for it is a fact that children have suffered from the 
thought that they were to be literal "lambs" in the 
Saviour's fold. This recognition of the limits be- 
tween the fanciful and the false needs to be borne 
in mind at every stage of a child's training. The 
false is not to be tolerated. The fanciful is to 
be allowed a large place. 

This truth applies also to the realm of fairy- 
tale reading. A child can read choice fairy tales, 
understanding that they are fanciful, with less dan- 
ger to his mind and character than he would incur 
in the reading of a falsely colored religious story- 
book. In the one case he knows that the narra- 
tion is wholly fanciful, while in the other case he is 
liable to be misled through the belief that what 
is both fictitious and false may have been a reality. 
Not the wholly fanciful, but the fictitiously false, in 



282 HINTS ON CHILD 'TRAINING. 

a child's reading, is most likely to be a means of 
permanent harm to him. 

A child's imagination can safely be allowed large 
play, in his amusements, in his speech, and in his 
reading. He knows the difference between the 
fanciful and the false quite as well as his parents 
do. It is the line between the false and the real in 
moral fiction that he needs help in defining. It 
will be well for him if he has parents who under- 
stand that distinction, and who are ready to give 
him help accordingly. 



XXIX. 

GIVING ADDED VALUE TO A 
CHILUS CHRISTMAS. 



Christmas is a day of days to the little folks, be- 
cause of the gifts it brings to them. But Christmas 
gifts have a greater or a lesser value in the eyes of 
children according to the measure of the giver's 
self which is given with them. It is not that chil- 
dren intelligently prize their gifts, as older persons 
are likely to, in proportion as they read in them 
the proofs of the giver's loving labor in their 
preparation. But it is that to children the Christ- 
mas gifts by themselves are of minor value, in com- 
parison with the interest excited in the manner 
of their giving, through labors that really repre- 
sent the giver's self, whether the children perceive 
this, at the time, or not. 

The Christmas stocking and the Christmas tree 

283 



284 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

give added value to the gifts that they cover; and 
neither tree nor stocking can be made ready for 
Christmas morning without patient and loving 
labor, on the part of the parents, during the night 
before. Moreover, beyond the dazzling attractions 
of the ornamented tree, and the suggestive outline 
of the bulging stocking, the more there is to pro- 
voke cui;iosity and to incite endeavor, on the chil- 
dren's part, in the finding and securing of their 
Christmas portion, the better the children like it, 
and the more they value that which is thus made 
theirs. 

It takes time and work and skill to make the 
most, for the children, of a Christmas morning; 
but it pays to do this for the darlings, while they 
still- are children. They will never forget it; and 
it will be a precious memory to them all their 
life through. It is one of the child-training agen- 
cies which a parent ought to be glad to use 
for good. 

One good man might be named who has brought 
to perfection the art of making Christmas delight- 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 285 

ful to children. He has no children of his own; 
so he makes it his mission to give happiness to 
other people's children. The story of bright and 
varied Christmas methods in his home would fill 
a little volume. His plans for Christmas are never 
twice alike; hence the children whom he gathers 
say truly, "There was never anything like this be- 
fore." Take a single Christmas for example. This 
child-lover was busy getting ready for it for weeks 
in advance. Money he spent freely, but he did 
not stop with that. Day and evening, with a lov- 
ing sister's help, he worked away getting every- 
thing just to his mind — which was sure to be just 
to the children's mind. At last Christmas eve 
was here; so w^ere the children — nieces and 
nephews, and others more remote of kin, gath- 
ered in his home to wait for the hoped-for day. 
Christmas morning came at last. Waking and 
sleeping dreams had all been full of coming de- 
lights to the children ; for they knew enough from 
the past to be sure that good was in store for 
them. No one overslept, that morning. Accord- 



286 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

ing to orders, they gathered in the breakfast-room. 
Their stockings were hanging from the mantel, but 
limp and empty. Not one suspicious package or 
box was to be seen. Breakfast was first out of the 
way, that the morning might be free for a right 
good time. Then the day was fairly open. Each 
went to his or her stocking. There was nothing 
in it but a little card, pendent from a thread com- 
ing over the mantel edge. On that card was a 
rhyming call to follow the thread wherever it 
might lead ; somewhat after this form : 

" Charley, dear, if you'll follow your nose, 
And your nose will follow this string 
Throughout the house, wherever it goes, — 
You will come to a pretty thing." 

Every stocking told the same story, in varied 
form, and every child stood holding a frail thread, 
Avondering to what it would lead, and waiting 
the signal for a start. At the word, all were 
off together. 

It was a rare old house, richly furnished with 
treasures of art and fancy from all the world over. 



HINTS ON CHILD -TRAINING. 287 

The breakfast-room was heavily paneled in carved 
wood and hung with ancient Gobelin tapestry. 
The threads which the children followed passed 
back of the large Swiss clock, along the wall 
under the tapestry, out by the parlor with its 
Cordova-leather panels, into a picture-hung recep- 
tion room, and there mounted to the ceiling above, 
up through a colored glass sky-light When the 
children saw that, they scampered through the 
marble-tiled hall, up the broad polished walnut 
staircase to the passage above, and there drew 
up their threads, and started on a new hunt. 

From this fresh point of departure the different 
threads took separate directions. They led hither 
and thither, the children following, almost holding 
their breaths with the excitement of pursuit and 
expectation. Along the corridor walls, under rows 
of Saracen tiles and Italian majolica and Sevres 
porcelain, back of old paintings, through the well- 
filled library, into and out of closets stored with 
fishing-tackle and hunting-gear, through rooms 
spread with Turkish mats and rich with coverings 



288 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

of Persian embroidery, up into the third story, 
and down along the under side of the banister 
rail, back to the lower floor, again the threads led 
the way and the children followed. It was a happy 
hour for old and young. 

By and by the threads came once more to a com- 
mon point, passing under a closed door out of a rear 
hall, where a printed placard called on each child 
to wait until all were together. One by one they 
came up with beaming faces and bounding hearts. 
The door was opened. There in the center of the 
disclosed room were seven mammoth pasteboard 
Christmas boots, holding from one to three pecks 
each, marked with the names of the several chil- 
dren, and filled to overflowing. Each child seized 
a boot, and hurried, as directed, back to the break- 
fast-room. 

Then came new surprises. All hands sat on the 
floor together. Only one package at a time was 
opened, that all might enjoy the disclosures to the 
full. And there were unlooked-for directions on 
many a package. One child would take a package 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 289 

from her Christmas boot, and, on removing the 
first wrapper, would find a written announcement 
that the package was to be handed over to her 
cousin. A Httle later, the cousin would be di- 
rected to pass along another package to a third 
one of the party. And so the morning went by. 
How happy those children were! What life-long 
memories of enjoyment were then m.ade for them! 
And how thoroughly the good uncle and aunt 
enjoyed that morning with its happiness which 
they had created ! 

There were elegant and fitting presents found 
in those Christmas boots; but the charm of that 
day was in the mysteries of that pursuing chase 
all over that beautiful house, and in the excitements 
of prolonged anticipation and wonder. Those 
children will never have done enjoying that morn- 
ing. The choicest gifts then received by them had 
an added value because their generous giver had 
put so much of himself into their preparation and 
distribution. And this is but an illustration of a 
truth that is applicable in the v/hole realm of 

19 



290 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

efforts at gladdening the hearts of the little ones 
on Christmas or any other day. It matters not, 
so far, whether the home be one of abundance 
or of close limitations, whether the gifts be many 
or few, costly or inexpensive. 

He who would make children happy must do 
for them and do with them, rather than merely 
give to them. He must give himself with his 
gifts, and thus imitate and illustrate, in a degree, 
the love of Him who gave himself to us, who is 
touched with the sense of our enjoyments as well 
as our needs, and who, with all that He gives us, 
holds out an expectation of some better thing in 
store for us : of that which passeth knowledge and 
understanding, but which shall fully satisfy our 
hopes and longings when at last we have it in 
possession. 



XXX. 

GOOD-NIGHT WORDS. 



If there is one time more than another when 
children ought to hear only loving words from 
their parents, and be helped to feel that theirs is 
a home of love and gladness, it is when they are 
going to bed at night. Good-night words to a 
child ought to be the best of words, as they are 
words of greatest potency. Yet not every parent 
realizes this important truth, nor does every child 
have the benefit of it. 

The last waking thoughts of a child have a 
peculiar pov/er over his mind and heart, and are 
influential in fixing his impressions and in shaping 
his character for all time. When he turns from 
play and playmates, and leaves the busy occupa- 
tions of his little world, to lie down by himself to 

sleep, a child has a sense of loneliness and depend- 

291 



292 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

ence which he does not feel at another time. Then 
he craves sympathy; he appreciates kindness; he 
is grieved by harshness or cold neglect. 

How glad a true child is to kneel by his mother's 
knee to pray his evening prayer, or to have his 
father kneel with him as he prays ! How he 
enjoys words of approval or encouragement when 
they precede the good night kiss from either par- 
ent ! With what warm and grateful affection his 
young heart glows as he feels the tender impress 
of his mother's hand or lips upon his forehead 
before he drops asleep. How bright and dear to 
him that home seems at such an hour ! How 
sorry he is for every word or act of unkindness 
which he then recalls from his conduct of the day ! 
How ready he then is to confess his specific acts of 
misdoing, and all his remembered failures, and to 
make new resolves and purposes of better doing 
for the future ! 

Whatever else a child is impatient to grow away 
from, he does not readily outgrow the enjoyment 
of his mother's good-night. As long as she is 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 293 

willing to visit his bedside, and give him a kiss, 
with a loving word, just before he goes to sleep, 
he is sure to count that privilege of his home as 
something above price, and without which he 
would have a sense of sad lack. And at no time 
is he more sure than then to be ready to do what- 
ever his mother would ask of him ; at no time do 
gentle, tender words of loving counsel from her 
sink deeper into his heart, or make an impression 
more abiding and influential. 

There are young men and women, still at their 
childhood's home, who look for their mother's 
coming to give them her good-night kiss, with 
no less of interest and grateful affection than when 
they were little boys and girls. And there are many 
more people— both young and old — away from 
their homes, who thank God with all their hearts 
for the ineffaceable memories of such tokens of their 
dear mother's love, while yet they were with her. 

Notwithstanding this, however, there is perhaps 
no one thing in which parents generally are more 
liable to err than in impatient or unloving words 



294 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

to their children when the little ones are going to 
bed. The parents are tired, and their stock of 
patience is at the lowest. If the children are not 
as quiet and orderly and prompt as . they should 
be, the parents rebuke them more sharply than 
they would for similar offenses earlier in the day. 
Too often children go to bed smarting under a 
sense of injustice from their parents, and brood 
over their troubles as they try to quiet themselves 
down to sleep. Their pillows are often wet with 
their tears of sorrow, and their little hearts are, 
perhaps, embittered and calloused through the 
abiding impressions of the wrong they have suf- 
fered, or the harshness they have experienced, 
while they were most susceptible to parental in- 
fluences for good or ill. 

It is a simple matter of fact that some parents 
actually postpone the punishment of their children 
for the misdeeds of the day until the leisure hour 
of twilight and bedtime. A great many mothers 
besides the " old woman who lived in a shoe," 
in providing for a large family of children, have 



I 



HINTS ON CHILD - TRA INING. 295 

often "whipped them all soundly, and sent them 
to bed." Perhaps children, as a rule, receive more 
whippings at bed-time than at any other of the 
twenty-four hours. And unquestionably they then 
have more scoldings. 

"Do you hear me, children?" sounds out the 
voice of many a mother into the nursery as the 
children are getting to bed. "If you don't stop 
playing and talking, and go right to sleep, I'll 
come up there and just make you." And that 
is the echo of that mother's voice which rings 
longest in her children's ears. 

Again, there are mothers who, without any 
thought of unkindness, are unwise enough to de- 
liberately refuse a good-night kiss to their chil- 
dren, as a penalty for some slight misconduct; not 
realizing the essential cruelty of withholding from 
the little ones this assurance of affection, at a time 
when the tender heart prizes it above all else. 
The first effect of such a course as this is to cause 
bitterness of grief to the children. The repetition 
of such a course is liable to loosen the parent's 



296 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING, 

loving hold on the little ones, and to diminish the 
value of the good-night kiss. It is, indeed, proba- 
bly true, that more children out of reputable homes 
are soured, and estranged, and are turned astray, 
through harshness and injustice, or by unwise 
severity, at their bed-time hour, than from any 
other provoking cause in their home-life. 

Even where there is no harshness of manner 
or severity of treatment on the part of the parents, 
there is often an unv/ise giving of prominence, just 
then, to a child's faults and failures, so as to sadden 
and depress the child unduly, and to cast a shade 
over that hour which ought to be the most hope- 
ful and restful of all the waking hours. Whatever 
is said by a parent in the lijie of instruction 
toward a better course, at such a time, should be 
in the way of holding up a standard to be reached 
out after, rather than of rebuking the child's mis- 
doings and shortcomings in the irrevocable past. 
The latest waking impressions of every day, on 
every child, ought to be impressions of peace and 
joy and holy hope. 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 297 

A sensitive, timid little boy, long years ago, was 
accustomed to lie down to sleep in a low " trundle- 
bed," which was rolled under his parents' bed by 
day, and was brought out for his use by night. 
As he lay there by himself in the darkness, he 
could hear the voices of his parents, in their 
lighted sitting-room, across the hall-way, on the 
other side of the house. It seemed to him that 
his parents never slept; for he left them awake 
when he was put to bed at night, and he found 
them awake when he left his bed in the morning. 
So far this thought was a cause of cheer to him, 
as his mind was busy with imaginings in the weird 
darkness of his lonely room. 

^v After loving good-night words and kisses had 
been given him by both his patents, and he had 
nestled down to rest, this little boy was accus- 
tomed, night after night, to rouse up once more, 
and to call out from his trundle-bed to his strong- 
armed father, in the room from which the light 
gleamed out, beyond the shadowy hall- way, "Are 
you there, papa?" And the answer would come 



298 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

back cheerily, "Yes, my child, I am -here." "You'll 
take care of me to-night, papa; won't you?" was 
then his question. "Yes, I'll take care of you, my 
child," was the comforting response. " Go to sleep 
now. Good-night." And the little fellow would 
fall asleep restfuUy, in the thought of those assur- 
ing good-night words. 

A little matter that was to the loving father; 
but it was a great matter to the sensitive son. 
It helped to shape the son's life. It gave the 
father an added hold on him ; and it opened up 
the way for his clearer understanding of his de- 
pendence on the loving watchfulness of the All- 
Father. And to this day when that son, himself a 
father and a grandfather, lies down to sleep at 
night, he is accustomed, out of the memories of 
that lesson of long ago, to look up through the 
shadows of his earthly sleeping-place into the 
far-off light of his Father's presence, and to call 
out, in the same spirit of child-like trust and help- 
lessness as so long ago, " Father, you'll take care 
of me to-night; w^on't you?" And he hears the 



HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 299 

assuring answer come back, " He that keepeth 
thee will not slumber. The Lord shall keep thee 
from all evil. He shall keep thy soul. Sleep, my 
child, in peace." And so he realizes the twofold 
blessing of a father's good-night words.^r^ 

A wise parent will prize and \yill rightly use the 
hour of the children's bed-time. That is the 
golden hour for good impressions on the children's 
hearts. That is the parent's choicest opportunity of 
holy influence. There should be no severity then, 
no punishment at that time. Every word spoken 
in that hour should be a word of gentleness and 
affection. The words which are most likely to be 
borne in mind by the children, in all their later 
years, as best illustrating the spirit and influence 
of their parents, are the good-night words of those 
parents. And it may be that those w^ords are the 
last that the parents shall ever have the privilege 
of speaking to their children ; for every night of 
sleep IS a pregnant suggestion of the night of the 
last sleep. Let, then, the good-night words of 
paren to their children be always those words by 



300 HINTS ON CHILD-TRAINING. 

which the parents would be glad to be remem- 
bered when their voices are forever hushed ; and 
which they themselves can recall gladly if their 
children's ears are never again open to good-night 
words from them. 



INDEX, 



Abraham as a child-trainer, 14, 

IS- 

Accidents, sympathy with chil- 
dren in, 255. 

Adams, John Quincy, on the 
mother-love, 271. 

Addison, Joseph, on reading, 175, 

Affectation, of grief, for selfish 
ends, 98. 

Afraid, when a child is old enough 
to be, 130. 

Allowing play to a child's imagi- 
nation, 277-282 (see Imagina- 
tion). 

Ambidextrous gain of being, 59. 

Amusements: training a child in, 
155-164 ; necessary to children, 
155 ; bad companionship to be 
avoided in, 159 ; should have 
no element of chance, 160 ; 
should not involve late hours, 
161 ; a choice of reading in, 176. 

Anger: never right in conference 
with a child, 44; never punish a 
child in, 205-216; defined, 205, 
206; confession by a parent of 
its influence on him, 209; its 
exhibit as " indignation " in 
punishing, 212 ; illustration of 
its evil on the mission-school 
superintendent, 213. 

Animals : training better than 
breaking for them, 50 ; their 
knowledge through training, 
143 ; gain of calmness in train- 
ing them, 220. 



Answering: a child's request de- 
liberately, 107 ; a child's ques- 
tions, importance of, 122 ; wise 
methods of, 124-128. 

Apologizing, duty and manliness 
of, 172. 

Appetite : early control of, possi- 
ble, 99 ; training a child's, 109- 
118. 

Assertion, self, inconsistent with 
courtesy, 166. 

Atmosphere, influence of the home, 
257-262. 

Bad boy, the : some traits of, 207 ; 
example of, in a mission-school, 
213. 

Bashful child, the, 18. 

Bedtime : a child's impressibility 
at, 291-293 ; a parent's irrita- 
bility at, 293-295 ; mistakes of 
parents at, 295-297 ; illustrative 
memories of, 297-300. 

Beginning : of training for a child, 
15; of a child's self-control, 94. 

Bending a child's will, distin- 
guished from its breaking. 38. 

Best things kept for Sunday, 146. 

Bible-study on Sunday is not al- 
ways worship, 142. 

Books [see Reading]. 

Braddock and Washington as con- 
trasting cowardice and fear, 225. 

Bravery consistent with fear, 225. 

Breaking a child's will is never 
right, 47-52. 

301 



302 



INDEX. 



Bushnell, Horace: on giving a 
premium to a child's fretting, 97; 
on rewarding silence with ' ' dain- 
ties," 97; on a parent's sym- 
pathy with a child s plays, 157 f ; 
on the place for a parental ex- 
plosion against evil, 212. 

Candy: used wrongly, 97, 116; 
reserved for Sunday, 148. 

Censure : few words better than 
many in, 220; a child's sorrow 
from a playmate's, 243 ; evil of 
unsympathetic, 254. 

Centripetal force of some amuse- 
ments, 162, 

Chance, the element of, not ad- 
missible in children's amuse- 
ments, 160. 

Character : shaped by child-train- 
ing, 16; possibilities of, per- 
ceived, 73 ; shown in fears, 223. 

Choice : faculty of, identified with 
the will, 38 ; God's dealings 
with men, on the basis of their 
freedom of, 39; not abrogated 
by rewards and punishments, 
40; of obedience or punish- 
ment, a fair one, 44, 46 ; for a 
child by parents, of studies and 
duties, 58; of food and drink, 
109; of amusements, 156, 164 ; 
of reading, 176; of companion- 
ships, 197 f . ; of a residence, 
school, a week-day school, or 
a Sunday-school, 201. 

Christ [see Jesus Christ]. 

Christian faith, the remedy for 
child-sorrows, 245. 

Christmas : celebration of, may il- 
lustrate Sabbath observance, 146 ; 
distinguishing then between fact 
and fancy, 279; giving added 
value to a child's, 283-290. 

Church services should be made 
attractive to children, 153. 



Classic examples of table-talk, 187. 
Coaxing a child to be quiet, 97. 
College curriculum, its value as a 

means of training, 56. 
Comforting children by sympathy, 

249. 
Companionships: in a child's 

amusements to be guarded, 159; 

guiding a child in, 197-204. 
Condiments, a child's use of, iii, 

115. 

Confession : of faults won through 
parental • sympathy, 254; a 
child's readiness for, at bedtime, 
292. 

Conscientiousness, of young pa- 
rents, as a cause of overdoing 
child-training, 84 f. 

Control [see Self-Control]. 

Conversation : honoring a child's 
interest in adult, 79 ; evil to a 
child of having himself for the 
topic of, 170, 174 ; favorable 
occasion for, at family meals, 
189. 

Counseling, not identical with 
training, 17. 

Courtesy : training a child to, 165- 
174. 

Cowardice, distinguished from 
fear, 224. 

Criticism, of our children, by 
others, to be heeded, 34. 

Crying: controlling by self-con- 
trol, 96 ; not recognized as a 
means of gain, 106; a child's 
earliest action, 239. 

Cultivating a child's taste for read- 
ing, 175-186 [see Reading]. 

Curbing, an element in training, 
30- 

Dark side of life, seen first by the 
child, 239. 

David's recognition of the mother- 
love, 264. 



INDEX. 



303 



Dealing tenderly with a child's 
fears, 223-238 [see Fears], 

Death in the atmosphere, 258. 

Definition : of training, 11 ; of 
teaching, 12; of faith, 129; of 
courtesy, 165 ; of good-breed- 
ing, 166 ; of anger, 206 ; of pun- 
ishment, 207 ; of scolding, 217 ; 
of sympathy, 248 ; of home at- 
mosphere, 259; of the false and 
of the unreal, 277. 

Denying : a child wisely, 61-70 ; 
not to be done hastily, 107. 

De Quincey on " fine manners," 
166. 

Diagnosis, important in parental 
care, as in medical practice, 

30- 

Dictionary, at hand for use in 
table-talk, 193. 

Discerning a child's special need 
of training, 29-36. 

Discipline : by the use of " must " 
in child-training, 53 f. ; example 
of Spartan, 68 ; danger of its 
overdoing, 85, 90; in eating and 
drinking, 109 f. ; in the mission- 
school, 213, 214. 

Dogs : to be trained, not broken, 
50 f. ; a natural tone of voice in 
the training of, 219. 

Dolls, as a child's treasure, 243. 

Duty of training children, 17-22. 

Education: begins with train- 
ing rather than teaching, 12; 
progress in methods of, 54. 

Eli honoring the child Samuel's 
individuality, 73. 

English custom of separating pa- 
rents and children at meal-time, 
190. 

Etiquette, distinguished from 
courtesy, 170. 

Eton, influenx^e of its playground 
on the battle of Waterloo, 161, 



Ex post facto laws not justifiable, 

215- 
Eye and ear, trained by playthings 
and games, 160. 

Fact and fancy, a child distin- 
guishes between, 277. 

Fairy-tales : value and place of, 
178 ; safer reading than falsely 
colored religious story-books, 
281. 

Faith, training a child's, 129-138. 

Fancy and fact [see Fact]. 

Fathers sharing the amusements 
of children. 158. 

Faults : of children, friends and 
neighbors may see those which 
parents do not, 33 ; should ex- 
cite parental sympathy, 253 ; 
children more ready to confess, 
at bedtime, 292. 

Fears, dealing tenderly with a 
child's, 223-238. 

Feeble-minded children, their spe- 
cial lack, 20, 21. 

Fiction : place and value of, in 
child's reading, 178 ; no place 
for the highly colored and over- 
wrought, 182 ; when false is per- 
nicious, 281. 

First child, danger of overdoing 
the training of the, 84, 87. 

Food : for children, should be 
chosen by parents, 109 ; inher- 
ited tastes for, may be overcome 
by training, 109 ; freaks of ap- 
petite for, 112; an American 
educator's method of traming 
his children's tastes for, 114. 

Forcing a child's will : never right, 
42 f. ; permanent harm of, 48. 

Freedom : of man's will, the basis 
of divine dealing, 39, and fore- 
ordained, 40 ; to ask questions, 
limited, 123 ; should be permit- 
ted in family table - talk, 192 ; 



304 



INDEX, 



from anxiety and sorrow not 
characteristic of childhood, 239. 

Freshness of a child's thought on 
profound themes, 80, 131, 

" Friend-enemies," parents as, ac- 
cording to Herbert Spencer, 
255. 

Games : for Sunday, 147 ; should 
be made a means of good, 159 ; 
the element of chance should 
be excluded from, 160 ; of an 
intellectual nature, 163 ; the 
right use of imagination in, 278, 
279. 

Gentlemanliness, appealing to a 
boy's, 79. 

Gentleness : in child-training, 44 ; 
in dog-training, 50, 219 ; in man- 
aging a city mission-school, 213, 
214 ; in censuring, 220 ; in deal- 
ing with a child's fears, 223 f. 

"Ghosts and goblins," in child- 
fears, 226, 237. 

Gifts : abundance of, now unap- 
preciated, 67 ; at Christmas, 
valued in proportion to the giv- 
er's self going with them, 283, 
289. 

Gleason, the horse-trainer, meth- 
ods of, 50. 

Good-breeding, defined, 166. 

Good-night words, 291-300, 

Gospel of John, as a first Bible 
book for South Sea Islanders, 
132. 

Grief: affectation of, for rewards, 
97 ; freedom from, not charac- 
teristic of childhood, 239. 

Guests, permitting children to sit 
at table with, 189. 

Guiding a child in companion- 
ships, 197-204 [see Companion- 
ships], 

Gullet, rubbing of the, a primitive 
custom, 14. 



Habits : formed in infancy, 13, 94; 
affected by training, 27 ; should 
be regulated by parents, 56, no, 
112, 117. 

Hagar, an example of the mother- 
love, 265. 

Hammond, S. T., on dog-train- 
ing, 50, 219. 

Hannah, an example of the mother- 
love, 266, 

Hasty denial of a child's request, 
unwise, 107. 

History, a child trained to enjoy 
books of, 180. 

Home : amusements of, should be 
a centripetal force, 162; to be 
made attractive, 163. 

Home atmosphere, influence of, 
162 f.. 257-262, 

Honoring a child's individuality 
23. 29, 37. 57. 71-82, 

Horses trained, not broken, 50. 

Illustrations : on the effects 
of training, 24 ; Johnny and his 
father, as to shutting the door, 
42 ; a boy addressing a visitor 
by a familiar title, 46 ; from 
animal-training, 50, 219 ; flog- 
ging children on Innocents' 
Day, 54; the raisin-box wagon, 
67 ; self-denial of Spartans, 68 ; 
difference between clay and the 
living germ, 72 ; boy who knew 
better than his mother how sick 
he was, 76; boy who could not 
spare his watch, 77; stanzas 
from Wordsworth, 81 ; a young 
father over-disciplining his first 
child, 84, 87 ; " yanking " at the 
reins, 91 ; "I want to be paci- 
fied," 97; an American edu- 
cator training the children's ap- 
petite for food, 114; Shetland 
ponies trained to eat hay, 116; 
Bishop Patteson among the 



INDEX. 



305 



South Sea Inlanders, 132 ; a 
boy's rejoicing that Monday had 
come, 153 ; battle of Waterloo 
won on Eton's playground, 161 ; 
Fourth of July suggesting study 
of American history, 184 ; the 
table-talk of famous guests, as a 
means of education, 191 ; lateral 
and perpendicular forces, 198 ; 
a parent who could punish only 
when angry, 209 ; a mission- 
school boy reproving his super- 
intendent, 213 ; a child pun- 
ished in love, responding with 
iove,2i4; Braddock and Wash- 
ington in the presence of peril, 
225 ; a baby who " doesn't like 
God's voice," 231 ; a father 
overcoming his child's fear of 
lightning, 231 ; power of im- 
aginary fear over a strong man, 
233 ; trusting God when afraid, 
236 ; " Do robbers take dolls ? " 
243 ; a boy suicide, 245 ; from 
Herbert Spencer, on sympathy, 
249 ; life and death in the atmos- 
phere, 258 ; historical, of a 
mother's love, 263-276 ; of the 

. play of a child's imagination, 
278 ; of Christmas festivities, 
284 f.; "the old woman that 
lived in a shoe," 294; the boy 
calling from his " trundle-bed" 
to his father, 297. 

Imagination : encouraging free 
play of a child's, 176; a cause 
of child-fears, 225 ; its part in 
the fears of the mature man, 
233 ; distinguished from super- 
stition, 234; to be appealed to, 
in overcoming such fears, 235, 
236 ; a child's, to be guarded 
from ghost-stories, 237; allow- 
ing play to a child's, 277-282. 

Imperfect development of every 
child, 21. 



Improvements in school appli- 
ances, etc., 54. 

Incarnation, disclosure of, in train- 
ing child-faith, 136. 

Inclination must submit to dis- 
cipline, 57. 

Indignation, in punishing, dis- 
tinguished from anger, 212. 

Influence of the home atmos- 
phere, 257-262. 

Innate, faith toward God is, but 
knowledge of him is not, 130. 

" Innocents' Day," a time for flog- 
ging children, 54. 

Instinctive: faith of every child, 
129; fears, the value of, 229. 

Interrogation-point, a child as an 
animated, 119. 

Issue with a child to be avoided 
as far as possible, 46, 88. 

James and John, their mother's 
example of the mother-love, 266. 

Jeroboam's wife, an example of 
the mother-love, 266. 

Jesus Christ : incarnation of, read- 
ily grasped by a child's faith, 
136 ; table-talk of, 188 ; recog- 
nizing, on the cross, his mother's 
love, 265 ; sympathizes with our 
enjoyments, 290. 

Jochebed, an example of the 
mother-love, 265. 

John's Gospel as a first book for 
heathen converts, 132. 

Johnson, Dr., on reading, 175 ; on 
the mother-love, 269. 

Joyful observance of the Lord's 
Day, 141, 153. 

Judgment, in judge or parent, 
should not be hasty, 206. 

Kindergarten, a fundamental 
truth in its system, 160. 

Knowledge : begins with a ques- 
tion, 119; questions should be 



3o6 



INDEX. 



directed in order to gain, 125 ; 
regarding God, must be dis- 
closed to the child, 130. 

Late hours, amusements of the 
child should not involve, 161. 

Laughing : a time for, 99 ; not so 
easy, for a baby, as crying, 239. 

Letting alone as a means of child- 
training, 83-92. 

Life : children see dark side of, 
first, 239 ; burdens of, rest heavi- 
est on the child -nature, 240; 
death and, in the atmosphere, 
258. 

Lightning and thunder, overcom- 
ing a child's fears of, 231. 

Limitations : scope and, of child- 
training, 23 - 28 ; to a child's 
privilege of question-asking, 123. 

Lord's Day : every day is, 139 ; set 
apart from other days, in child- 
ish occupations, toys, etc., 144. 

Love : God's, includes the bad 
child, 135 ; necessary to accept- 
able worship or work, 140 ; pa- 
rental, in punishing, awakens 
child's, 214 ; distinguished from 
sympathy, 248, 256 ; an element 
of the home atmosphere, 261 ; 
the power of a mother's, 263- 
276 ; the divine compared with 
a mother's, 261 ; historical illus- 
trations of, and testimonies to a 
mother's, 263-276. 

" Luck," no place for it in chil- 
dren's games, 160. 

Luther, Martin : individuality of, 
in childhood, honored by Tre- 
bonius, 74 ; on the mother-love, 
270. 

Macaulay, Lord, on the mother- 
love, 272. 

Making believe as distinct from 
deception, 278. 



Manliness promoted by amuse- 
ments, 160. 

Manners, fine, according to De 
Quincey, 166. 

Meals, mental and moral enjoy- 
ments at, 187. 

Memory : of a mother's love, its 
permanent influence, 263 ; illus- 
trated, 266-273 ; of Christmas 
festivities, 289 ; of the good- 
night kiss, 293. 

Mental defects remedied, 25. 

Misrepresenting God to a child, 

135- 

Mission-school, illustration of the 
bad boy in one, 213. 

Moses, the possibiUties of his char- 
acter in infancy, 72. 

Mother Goose, value of, 177. 

Mother : has more time than the 
father to share children's amuse- 
ments, 158 ; scolding by a, no 
better than an apple-woman's, 
218 ; commandments to honor, 
267. 

Mother's love : the power of a, 
263 - 276 ; memory of, in the 
good-night kiss, 293. 

Music in the home, 163. 

" Must" the place of, in training, 
53-60 [see Discipline]. 

" Nagging '" is not training, 90. 

Napoleon Bonaparte, on the 
mother-love, 273. 

Natural : objects, suggesting lines 
of reading, 184; tone of voice, 
in dog -training and in child- 
training, 219 ; power of sym- 
pathy nof wholly, 256. 

Neighbors' criticism of our chil- 
dren valuable, 33. 

Never punish a child in anger, 205- 
216. 

News, daily, outlined by father at 
breakfast table, 193. 



INDEX. 



107 



Night [see Good-night Words]. 
Nonsense songs, value of, 177. 
Nott, President, soothed at ninety 
by old lullabies, 271. 

Observance of Sabbath, train- 
ing a child to, 139-154. 

"Only child, the:" not always 
"spoiled," 63 ; disadvantage of 
his lack of companions at home, 
200. 

Opinions of a child, honoring the, 
80. 

Overdoing in child-training: 
danger of, 83 ; an error of 
the thoughtful as well as the 
thoughtless, 90. 

Oxygen, analogy from, 258 f. 

Parents: undervalue their power 
to train, 17, 35; blindness of, to 
the peculiar faults of their chil- 
dren, 31; should heed criticism of 
neighbors and friends, 33 ; faults 
of, often reappear in their chil- 
dren, 35 ; should never forge a 
child's choice, 41 ; anger no help 
to, in training, 44, 205 ; perma- 
nent harm to, in breaking their 
child's will, 48 ; should con- 
trol a child's personal habits, 
56; must often deny a child's 
requests, 62 ; must honor a 
child's individuality, 71 ; often 
inferior in possibilities to their 
children, 75 ; young, in danger 
of over-disciplining a child, 83 ; 
should seek to avoid direct is- 
sues ^\'ith a child, 89 ; teaching 
the infant self-control, 94 ; train- 
ing children to tease, 102 ; re- 
spect of, lost by children who 
tease, 105 ; giving sugar and 
condiments, 116; average, un- 
able to answer questions of 
average children, 122 ; as re- 



vealers of revelation, 131 ; must 
have faith in order to train a 
child's faith, 137 ; should pro- 
vide peculiar occupations and 
privileges for Sunday, 144, 148 ; 
should be the center of their 
children's amusements, 157, 163; 
should learn from the kinder- 
garten system, 160; should train 
children to courtesy, 173; re- 
sponsible for children's reading, 
176, 180; should give children 
a share in family table-talk, 190, 
196; responsible for choice of a 
child's companions, 197, 201 ; 
should never punish in anger, 
205 ; as peace-keepers and po- 
licemen, 211 ; should never 
scold, 217 ; should deal tenderly 
with child-fears, 223 ; should 
have sympathy for child-sor- 
rows, 242 ; should point to 
Christ, as the way of comfort, 
246; as "friend-enemies," 255; 
responsible for a home-atmos- 
phere, 259-261 ; allowing play 
to a child's miagination, 277 f. ; 
should prepare for Christmas 
festivities, 283 f. ; the good- 
night words of, 291. 

Passions and appetites, self-con- 
trol of, should begin early, 99. 

Patience, necessity of: in dog- 
training and child-training, 220; 
especially at child's bedtime, 
294. 

Patteson, Bishop, among the 
South Sea Islanders, 132. 

Paul's self-control, 98. 

Person, faith rests on a, 129. 

Personal : power measured by 
will-power, 37; character to be 
held sacred, 39, 71 ; rights of 
children, honoring, '^'j ; merit, 
not a means of acceptance with 
God, 135. 



308 



INDEX. 



Physical: defects remedied, 25; 
pain, endurance of, 96. 

Place of "must" in training, the, 
53-60. 

Place of sympathy in child-train- 
ing, 247-256. 

Playmates : treatment of visiting, 
171 ; unkindnesses of, 240 [see 
Companionships]. 

Playthings : use of, in training the 
faculties, 160 ; not a substitute for 
parental sympathy, 250; imagi- 
nation in the use of, 279, 280. 

Politeness, true, 166. 

Porter, President, on a college 
curriculum, 56. 

Power of a mother's love, the, 263- 
276 [see Mother's Love]. 

Prayer : meaning of, taught before 
the child can talk, 131; faith in, 
not to supplant faith in God, 
133 ; sharing a child's, 292 ; a 
new meaning of, gained through 
a child's good-night words, 299. 

Preferences, personal : not to con- 
trol study and work, 59 ; nor 
reading, 177. 

Profound thought possible to a 
child, 80: as of God's person- 
ality and love, 131 ; or, the doc- 
trine of the incarnation, 136. 

Protection of a child, in danger, 
distinguished from punishment, 
210, 211. 

Punish a child in anger, never, 
205-216. 

Punishment: divine, not destruc- 
tive of free-will, 40; teaching a 
child to choose obedience or, 
44 f ; undue severity of, 45 ; 
has a proper use, 205; should 
be a calm and judicial act, 206 ; 
distinguished from prompt pro- 
tection of a child in danger, 
210, 211; administered in love, 
is recognized as love prompted. 



214 ; often harder for a parent 
than for his child, 215 ; not to 
be inflicted upon an offense of 
ignorance, 215; child's perma- 
nent good the purpose of, 216 ; 
evil of postponing until the 
child's bedtime, 294, 295. 
Puzzles, for Sunday, 151. 

Questioner, training a child as 
a, 119-128. 

Questions : children encouraged 
to ask, 120; discouraged from 
asking improper, 123 ; value of 
a set time for answering, 124 ; 
should be in order to gam knowl- 
edge, 125 ; wisdom of deferring 
answers to some, 127 ; asking, in 
family table-talk, 192. 

Quiet talking more effective than 
scoldmg, 220. 

Rachel, an example of the 
mother-love, 265. 

Rarey, the horse-trainer, method 
of, 50. 

Reading t cultivating a child's 
taste for, 175-186 ; its value, ac- 
cording to Addison and John- 
son, 175 ; place and value of 
fiction in, 177, 178 ; taste for 
good should be aroused in child- 
hood, 180. 

Reasonable fears to be met by 
reason, 228. 

Recreation distinguished from 
amusement, 155. 

Reference-books, use of, in family 
table-talk, 193. 

Residence, companionships for 
children to be in mind, when 
choosing a, 201. 

Respect, self, of the courteous 
man, 166, 

Rest , not in inaction , but in change , 
142, 



INDEX. 



309 



Rewards : divine use of, 40 ; dan- 
gers in the use of, 97. 

Rich children in danger of being 
untrained in self-denial, 65. 

Ridicule cannot overcome child- 
fears, 224, 228. 

Rizpah, an example of the mother- 
love, 266. 

Romans, their table-talk, 187. 

Rubbing the gullet, a primitive 
custom, 14. 

Sabbath observance, training 
children to, 139-154. 

Samuel's individuality, in child- 
hood, honored by Eli, 73. 

Santa Claus, as a Christmas fancy, 
279. 

Science, training a child to enjoy 
books of, 180. 

Scolding : never in order, 217-222 ; 
most common at bedtime, 294. 

Scope and imitations of child- 
training, 23-28 [see Limitations]. 

Self-assertion not consistent with 
courtesy, 166. 

Self-control : training a child to, 
93-100; necessary for parents 
before punishing a child, 210 ; 
before censuring a child, 220. 

Self-denial : importance of train- 
ing children to, 62 ; an only 
child liable to lack stimulus to, 
200. 

Self-forgetfulness the basis of cour- 
tesy, 168. 

Selfishness fostered by the grant- 
ing of every request, 63. 

Self-respect of the courteous man, 
166. 

Sermons for children, read at home 
on Sunday, 150. 

Sharing: children's joys and sor- 
rows, 248, 253; children's Christ- 
mas pleasures, 290; in children's 
evening prayer, 29a. 



Shetland ponies trained to eat 
hay, 116. 

Shunammite woman, an example 
of the mother-love, 266. 

Silly questions not to be en- 
couraged, 125. 

Skelton, John, on scolding, 218. 

Skill, not chance, in children's 
games, 161, 

Soldier : fear felt by every, 224 ; 
imaginary fears of a, 234 ; find- 
ing peace on his death -bed 
through the mother-love, 274. 

Solomon : on child-training, 15 ; 
on honoring a mother, 267. 

Sorrows of children, the : 239-246 ; 
they call for sympathy, 247-256 ; 
because of harsh treatment at 
bedtime, 294. 

South Sea Islanders taught from 
John's Gospel first, 132. 

Spartan children trained to self- 
denial, 68. 

Special need of training, discern- 
ing a child's, 29-36. 

Spencer, Herbert, on intellectual 
sympathy with children, 249. 

Spoiled child, the: not always an 
" only child," 63 ; may be a first 
child, over-disciplined, 87. 

Studying a child's specific needs, 

35- 

Sugar-plums to "pacify ' crying 
children, 97, iii. 

Suicide of children, 244. 

Sunday-school : lesson, studied at 
home on Sunday, 150; attend- 
ance of, in early childhood, 152; 
library-book, mission of the 
average, 179 ; companionships 
in view while choosing a, 201. 

Symmetry in child-training, de- 
pendent on companionships, 200. 

Sympathy: of parents with chil- 
dren in amusements, 157; in 
companionships, 199; in fears, 



3IO 



INDEX. 



235 f. ; place of, in child-train- 
ing, 247-256; defined, 248, 256; 
Herbert Spencer on, 249; in a 
child's misdeeds and accidents, 
254 ; not wholly natural to pa- 
rents, 256 ; in the " home-atmos- 
phere," 261 ; craved by a child 
at bedtime, 292. 
Syro-Phoenician woman, an ex- 
ample of the mother-love, 266. 

Table-talk, the value of, 187- 
196. 

Taste in reading, cultivating a 
child's, 175-186 [see Reading]. 

Teaching distmguished from 
trainmg, 11. 

Tease, training a child not to, loi- 
108. 

Tenderly dealing with a child's 
fears, 223-238 [see Fears]. 

Thought, profound, possible to a 
child, 80. 

Thoughtfulness for others distin- 
guished from self-forgetfulness, 
169. 

Thunder and hghtning, overcom- 
ing a child's fear of, 231. 

Timidity to be overcome by train- 
ing, 227. 

Timothy's mother, an example of 
the mother-love, 266. 

Topics, assigning special, for next 
day's family table-talk, 194. 

Toys: for Sunday, 145-147; break- 
ing of, a serious matter to a child, 
243- 

Training: distinguished from 
teaching, 11 ; defined, 12 ; should 
begin at birth, 15 ; shapes char- 
acter, 16; more than counsel- 
ing, 17 ; limited by a child's 
capacity, 23; special, necessary 
for every child, 29 ; danger of its 
developing the poorer self, 30 ; 
the child's will, 37; need of gen- 



tleness in, 44; by discipline, 53 ; 
a child to do unpleasant duties, 
55. 591 by denying requests, 
61; of an only child, 62; letting 
alone as a means of, 83-92 ; of a 
first child, 84 f. ; overdoing in, 
an error, 90; "nagging" is not, 
90; to self-control, 93-100; not 
to tease, 101-108 ; Susannah 
Wesley's method of, 105 ; a 
child's appetite, 109-118; chil- 
dren as questioners, 119-128; a 
child's faith, 129-138 ; to Sab- 
bath observance, 139-154 ; in 
amusements, 155-164; to cour- 
tesy, 165-174; a child's taste in 
reading, 175 ; value of table- 
talk in, 189 ; child-companion- 
ships as an element in, 197; has 
no place for scolding, 217-222 ; 
tone of voice in, 219 ; by tender- 
ness toward a child's fears, 
223-238 ; joyousness as a result 
of, 240 ; sympathy as an aid in, 
247-256; home atmosphere as a 
power in, 257-262; power of a 
mother's love in, 263-276 ; 
through the play of a child's im- 
agination, 277-282 ; by good- 
night words and deeds, 291- 
300. 

Trebonius, honoring the indi- 
viduality of children, 74. 

Trust : child's, is instinctive, 130 ; 
prayer is not mere asking, but, 

134- 
"Tunge of a skolde," John Skel- 
ton's couplet on, 218. 

Unselfishness: the basis of 
courtesy, 165; in a child's com- 
panionships, 199. 

Value: of table-talk, 187-196; 
giving added, to a child's Christ- 
mas, 283-290. 



INDEX, 



311 



Values: child - sorrows measured 
by those of the child, 243. 

Voice, necessity of natural tone of, 
in training, 219. 

Wagon, raisin-box, 67. 
Wanting not always reason for 

granting, 69. 
Washington and Braddock as to 

fear, 225. 
Watch, boy who could not spare 

his, 77. 
Waterloo, battle of, won on Eton's 

playground, 161. 
Wear, parents should decide what 

children may, 117. 
Wellington, Duke of, quoted, 161. 
Wesley, Susannah, her method in 

training, 105. 
Whipping at bedtime, unwisdom 

of. 295. 



Will, training of, rather than 
breaking, 37-52. 

Wisdom: in denying a child, 61- 
70 ; more needed for letting 
alone than for commanding, 
91. 

Words, good-night [see Good- 
night]. 

Wordsworth, quoted, 81. 

Worship : more than mere quiet- 
ness in church, 142 ; family, on 
Sunday, 150. 

"Yanking" at the reins is not 
good driving, 91. 

Young : parents, in danger of 
over-disciplining, 83 ; teachers, 
peculiar influence of, 198 ; peo- 
ple, welcoming the mother's 
good-night kiss, 293. 



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